Arthur Viterito

Credentials

Background

Arthur Viterito is a retired geography professor formerly of the College of Southern Maryland and a policy advisor with the Heartland Institute. He previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the George Washington University.⁵

Viterito served for 12 months as the editor-in-chief of what some climate scientists called a “sham journal” titled “Environment Pollution and Climate Change.” Climate scientists described papers published in the journal as “garbage” and “ridiculous.”⁶ Viterito resigned from the journal “to pursue my research interests” in late 2017.

Since being contacted by DeSmog in 2017, two academics asked for their names to be removed from the journal’s “editorial board.” One scientist who asked his name be removed from the board, Manolis Tyllianakis, is an environmental economist working at a UK government agency.⁷

Tyllianakis had accepted an email invitation to be on the editorial board before the first issue had been published. He told DeSmog he had not read, written, or reviewed any articles. He said he was “very sorry I was included in such a journal” and said his own research showed he was “completely against” the views being expressed.⁸

He also said an “acceptance letter,” purporting to be from Tyllianakis, posted on the journal’s website, was a “complete fraud.” The second academic contacted by Desmog who asked his name be removed requested not to be identified.⁹

The owner of the journal, OMICS International, is facing deception charges in the United States for deceptive marketing practices rekated to claims their journals followed rigorous peer review and had high “impact factors.”¹⁰

Viterito is listed as one of the “founding members” of Climate Exit, or CLEXIT, a climate change denial group formed shortly after the UK’s decision to leave the EU. According to Clexit’s founding statement (PDF), “The world must abandon this suicidal Global Warming crusade. Man does not and cannot control the climate.”¹¹

Stance on Climate Change

August 7, 2017

Viterito appeared on the Heartland Institute’s daily podcast to discuss his view of “Why President Trump’s CLEXIT Decision Was the Right one”:¹²

On the program, Viterito describes himself as a “lukewarmist,” which he describes as believing that “carbon dioxide has some impact but I believe that the impact has been minimal.” He added:

“My work indicates that it’s not been a statistically significant driver of recent climate change. […] And there is a lot of really good work being done by people like Christopher Monckton and David Legates and Willie Soon on this. […] We don’t deny that globe is warming. We just disagree as to what the cause is.¹³

November 17, 2016

In an editorial published at the journal Environment Pollution and Climate Change, Viterito suggests that it is “prudent” to assume the science is not settled on climate change:¹⁴

“It appears that the most prudent course is to assume that the science on climate change is not “settled” and that, in light of numerous uncertainties, much work remains to be done. In particular, each of the ideas proposed by the skeptics must be fully assessed through careful, exhaustive research, and then either embraced or debunked on the weight of the empirical evidence,” Viterito wrote.¹⁵

October 2007

Viterito is signatory to “The Petition Project,” also known as the “Oregon Petition” which claims the following:¹⁶

“We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”¹⁷

Key Quotes

September 7, 2017

Viterito released a statement via the Heartland Institute opposing regulation of hydrofluorocarbons under the Clean Air Act:¹⁸

“In light of the many questions that remain concerning the nature and sensitivity of the global climate to greenhouse gases, this sort of regulatory overreach should not be allowed,” Viterito said. “Some of the newly developed substitutes for HFCs are prohibitively expensive.

“Honeywell’s HFO products are roughly ten times as costly as HFCs,” said Viterito. “As with so many other regulatory initiatives, replacing HFCs with HFOs would slow economic growth, eroding the buying power of American consumers in the process.”

”[…] To me, the most important takeaway from all of this is that the science is nowhere near settled. There’s a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done.”¹⁹

August 7, 2017

In an issue of the Heartland Institute’s daily podcast, Viterito claimed:²⁰

“There has been absolutely no change in drought frequency or drought since 1901. None whatsoever.”²¹

Citing a NERA Economic Consulting report, Viterito added “if the US were to decarbonize by the year 2050, it would […] amount to a total cost of about fourteen trillion dollars to the US economy by 2040. […] that is because the cost of renewables is sky high.”²²

February 24, 2017

In an editorial at the journal Environment Pollution and Climate Change, Viterito wrote:²³

”[…] [T]here are two radically different views on the state of the climate. In the mindset of an “alarmist”, the climate has warmed by a significant amount over the past century and human emissions of carbon dioxide are chiefly to blame. The ‘skeptics’ argue that the warming has been within the range of natural variability and is no cause for concern.

“One of the reasons this rift exists in the climate community has to do with the information that both sides are using. Or, in some cases, misinformation. The first instance of disputed data (or, as some would say, data tampering), was revealed in the infamous ‘Climate gate’ case […]”²⁴

Key Deeds

February 24, 2017

In an editorial at the journal Environment Pollution and Climate Change, Viterito claims the debunked “climategate” controversy is evidence of “disputed data […] or data tampering.” In the editorial, Viterito cites the supposed removal of one of his papers from Google scholar as the “Suppression of new ideas and new information.”²⁵

“There is evidence of suppressed information from this author,” he wrote. “Last year, I published a paper showing a strong correlation between mid-ocean geothermal heat release and recent global warming[6]. Needless to say, the paper lends no support to the anthropogenic warming (i.e., ‘alarmist’) point of view. […] It first appeared in August 2016, along with an editorial that cited it. However, the paper was abruptly delisted from the Google Scholar search engine five months later (January 2017) without explanation. Oddly enough, the editorial citing the paper is still listed on Google Scholar. Suppression of new ideas and new information can easily be viewed as a type of misinformation. How creative!”²⁶

May 26, 2016

Viterito appeared on the Heartland Institute’s daily podcast to discuss “his recent research exploring other factors that affect global temperatures”:²⁷

April 25, 2016

Viterito published a study titled “The Correlation of Seismic Activity and Recent Global Warming” in the Journal of Earth Science & Climatic Change, a journal run by OMICS International, a group facing deception charges in the United States for marketing practices claiming their journals had been following rigorous peer review and had high “impact factors.”²⁸ ²⁹

In his publication, Viterito argues that undersea volcanoes may be the cause for increases in Earth’s temperature as opposed to carbon dioxide from humans. He concludes that legislation to combat global warming should be delayed:³⁰

“To ameliorate the problems of rising global temperatures, legislative and taxing initiatives are currently being proposed and evaluated by governing bodies around the world. Most of these initiatives are designed to curb GHG emissions. However, this study shows that we may want to delay such actions until all of the climate system’s inputs are fully accounted for,” Viterito wrote.³¹

Under the acknowledgements section, Viterito also thanks fellow climate change denier Patrick Michaels “for his constructive comments.”³²

In response to Graham Readfearn’s reporting on the journal, Viterito describes DeSmog as “smear merchants” at a Heartland Institute blog post, and in an editorial at the Environment Pollution and Climate Change journal.³³ ³⁴