“This is just another example of lack of scruples that climate skeptics have shown in pursuing short-term financial advantages, and basically condemning the next generations to suffer the consequences of climate change due to our lack of prudent and responsible planning.”

With those words, the University of Maryland’s Distinguished Professor Eugenia Kalnay dismissed the Heartland Institute’s wholly discredited list of 500 Scientists with Documented Doubts about Man-Made Global Warming Scares.

Prof. Kalnay, with dozens of her colleagues, is outraged that Heartland Senior Fellow Dennis T. Avery included their names as contributors to a climate-change denial paper without their permission and in direct contradiction to their scientific work.

“I think it is very offensive and wrong to include my name in this list of ‘coauthors’ of a paper with which I disagree profoundly without even checking with me first,” Prof. Kalnay said in an interview today.

“I am not a climate change skeptic. To the contrary, I believe that, in addition to the undeniable greenhouse warming, we also have to consider the effects of deforestation and urbanization, which will make the warming even worse.

“I am sure the good scientists that I personally know who are in that list, are in a similar situation, and their names have been used without permission, and their ideas about climate change distorted.”

Prof. Kalnay is not a frequent or willing participant in the tawdry public relations war over climate change. She is a Distinguished Professor, a former Director of the Environmental Modeling Center for the National Weather Service and the lead author of the most cited paper in all geosciences

She is also gracious and respectful of the serious scientists who, for reasons she does not understand, choose today to challenge the science of global warming. She calls Richard Lindzen “charming and brilliant” and says that she has found some of Roger A. Pielke on the impact of land surface changes on climate “very inspiring.”

Unfortunately, this is also not the first time her name has been appended to a contrarian work without her permission. Fiction writer Michael Crighton included one of her papers among the scientific “references” that he included in his climate-change denial book State of Fear, although Prof. Kalnay said she had no idea how he was using her work to arrive at any of his conclusion. (A summary of the paper that Crighton quoted can be found here.)