Update 5:25PM CT Feb 15, 2012: I contacted Jim Lakely, the communications director for the Heartland Institute, to follow up on the leak. Lakely reiterated a
statement that appeared on the Heartland Institute website earlier this afternoon, stating that the "strategy document" identified in the below article is a fake. Here is what Lakely told me later this afternoon:
The "strategy" memo is a complete fabrication. No one who works for The Heartland Institute or is associated with our organization produced that document. It is a fake produced, presumably, by the person who stole the identity of one of our board members.
The Heartland Institute has not said this about the other documents in the leak. This lends credibility to the belief that the other documents are real, as does Heartland's characterization of them as not "fake" but "stolen."
It is important to note that although Lakely made the above statement, he did not respond to a separate, repeated inquiry about whether Heartland has spoken to David Wojick about preparing a K-12 global warming curriculum. Wojick didn't return an email inquiry either as of this writing. But a $75,000 expenditure for a "K-12 Climate Education Project" to be developed by Wojick appears on page 19 of the leaked budget document (
PDF), which is among the documents Heartland says were "stolen," with quarterly payments of $25,000 slated for June, September, and December. The group's Fundraising Plan says that:
Dr. Wojick has conducted extensive research on environmental and science education for the Department of Energy. In the course of this research, he has identified what subjects and concepts teachers must teach, and in what order (year by year), in order to harmonize with national test requirements. He has contacts at virtually all the national organizations involved in producing, certifying, and promoting science curricula.
Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on "modules" for grades 10-12 on climate change ("whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy"), climate models ("models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial"), and air pollution ("whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions").
Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact ("environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather"), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.
We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $5,000 per module, about $25,000 a quarter, starting in the second quarter of 2012, for this work. The Anonymous Donor has pledged the first $100,000 for this project, and we will circulate a proposal to match and then expand upon that investment.
But Jen Stuntsman, a DOE spokesperson, gave me the following statement about
Wojick, who the Heartland Institute lists as one of their experts:
David Wojick has been a part-time support contractor for the Office of Scientific and Technical Information since 2003, working to help the office manage and organize its electronic databases. He has never advised or conducted research for the Department on climate change or any other scientific topic, and the office he works for is not a research organization. As would be the case for any of the Department's roughly 100,000 contractors, his collaboration with the Heartland Institute is outside of any consulting work he has done with the Department, and any comments he makes on the subject matter of climate change are made as a public citizen and are not reflective of any Energy Department policies or research.
Also notable among the other documents is the Fundraising Plan (
PDF), which notes current contributions from major U.S. corporations, including Microsoft, State Farm and GM, as well as the Charles G. Koch Foundation, which Heartland expects to increase its contribution by 800 percent in this election year.
The Fundraising Plan also details Heartland's intent on using its pro-fracking communications efforts to raise funds in 2012:
We have not, however, yet attempted to raise funds from businesses with a financial interest in fracking. In 2012 we intend to correct that oversight and approach dozens of companies and trade associations that are actively seeking allies in this battle.
Once again, this approach is not based on science, but on doing the dirty work of vested interests to make rhetorical arguments to protect those interests regardless of what the science may say.
Thus while Heartland has expressly denied the authenticity of the Strategy document, it does nevertheless seem to be essentially in line with the strategy as actually put forth in their undisputed budget and fundraising documents.
___________________________________________________________________
A major event in the U.S. political battle over climate change happened this week with the unauthorized
release of secret internal documents that reveal the finances and truly Machiavellian strategy of the Heartland Institute, a leading oil-industry-funded disinformation machine designed to spread propaganda and cast doubt on the settled science of anthropogenic global warming.
Tuesday morning, an anonymous person set up a Gmail account and used it to send incriminating internal strategy and budget documents to the email inboxes of bloggers who write about science denialism and climate change, then immediately cancelled the gmail account. The documents appear to be genuine and have been checked against other sources, which confirm their authenticity. If true, they show a pattern of breathtaking mendacity.
Take, for instance, the Heartland Institute's strategy of promoting climate science disinformation and propaganda in America's K-12 science classes, among the children who will be most impacted by it. The group is "pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools." According to the Heartland Institute, Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. Fair enough, except when you read on.
His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain -- two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.
There, in black and white in the group's
strategy document, is the truly nefarious, unAmerican, bald-faced goal: to dissuade American science teachers from
teaching science. The group plans to pay Wojick $100,000 do develop a 20-module curriculum of obfuscation.
In an American science education crisis, where American students are ranking far down in international science rankings, this strategy should be inviting calls from congress for an investigation. Who is this Heartland Institute, who are their funders, what schools are adopting this curricula, and who is the mysterious "Anonymous donor" who is funding much of the miseducation of America's students? What other misinformation for political ends is being pushed into American science classrooms?
But the disinformation being played on the American people doesn't stop there. Heartland brags about how it has worked
to undermine the official United Nation's IPCC reports and paid a team of writers $388,000 in 2011 to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered.
This statement alone is enough to cast withering scientific doubt on anything and everything the Heartland Institute has ever produced. At the time, the Heartland Institute said of its
Reconsidered report, "
This isn't 'denial,' it's just common sense."
Any organization whose stated goal is not the discovery or communication of knowledge, but the
political goal to "
undermine" official reports is by definition not doing anything remotely like either science or common sense, but is instead using the language of science to work toward a predetermined ideological objective.
In other words,
rhetoric. Any reporter who now quotes or sources from a Heartland Institute report should realize that they are, by the Heartland Institute's own admission, printing ideologically-driven propaganda, not measurement-driven knowledge.
If you thought that was bad enough, consider the Heartland Institute's true objective, as evidenced by their "increased climate project fundraising" goals.
Other contributions will be pursued for this work, especially from corporations whose interests are threatened by climate policies.
And this is where it is laid bare. In my book
Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, I show why science is never partisan, but science is always political. That is because whenever it creates new knowledge, that knowledge either confirms or challenges
somebody's vested interests -- and those vested interests fight back.
In 1633, the seat of world political and economic power was the Vatican, and the Roman Catholic Church went to absurd lengths to
indict the scientist Galileo and cast doubt on his simple observations:
1. The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and
immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and
formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.
2. The proposition that the earth is not the center of the world, nor
immovable, but that it moves, and also with a diurnal action, is also
absurd, philosophically false, and, theologically considered, at least
erroneous in faith.
Today, the seat of world political and economic power is the U.S. energy industry. Koch Industries, for example, is the
second largest private held company in America, and a
major donor to the Heartland Institute. With a market cap of $407 billion, Exxon-Mobil is the
world's most valuable company, period.
It's no wonder energy companies find the simple, repeatable measurements of climate scientists threatening. But now we see just how nefarious are the lengths of disinformation to which some of them will go.
Anyone who is on the fence about whether climate change is really happening should consider the breathtaking, unAmerican manipulation of their minds and the minds of their children that makes up the core strategy of one of America's leading voices putting out supposedly "scientific" reports that question climate change.
The Heartland Institute has shown it has no credibility -- but worse, it has no heart.
Get Shawn Lawrence Otto's new book: Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, Starred Kirkus Review; Starred Publishers Weekly review. Visit him at http://www.shawnotto.com/. Like him on Facebook. Join ScienceDebate.org to get the presidential candidates to debate science.
Other stories on the Heartland documents
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shawn-lawrence-otto/heartland-institute-leaked-documents_b_1278059.html?ref=science&icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl1%7Csec3_lnk2%26pLid%3D136517
Environment Canada and NRTEE versus the Fraser Institute: An issue of quality
(I dont think this anynonmous donor id Ted Danson or Larry David)
Heartland Institute budget and strategy revealed
[Update Feb. 15. John Mashey has released a very timely report on Heartland and SEPP, Fake science, fakexperts, funny finances, free of tax, at Desmogblog (PDF 5Mb) with summaries from Richard Littlemore, and Mashey himself.]
[Update Feb. 15. Several news outles (e.g. the Guardian) are reporting that Heartland has branded one of the Heartland documents, the 2012 Climate Strategy, to be a forgery. (See also the Heartland press release). Since its authenticity is in question, I have decided to remove quotes from it as well as the link to that particular document. The Heartland projects discussed remain the same. I have removed one paragraph quoting the "expanded communication strategy".]
DesmogBlog today released an archive of Heartland Institute budget and strategy documents apparently leaked by someone with high level access.
An anonymous donor calling him (or her)self “Heartland Insider” has released the Heartland Institute’s budget, fundraising plan, its Climate Strategy for 2012 and sundry other documents (all attached) that prove all of the worst allegations that have been levelled against the organization.
The documents give a clear picture of Heartland money flows, showing exact amounts being paid to Heartland employees, and more importantly, the scientists involved in the ongoing NIPCC effort to disrupt the forthcoming IPCC AR5.
Heartland’s list of major projects also includes a new K-12 “global warming curriculum”. The curriculum will promote the idea that anthropogenic climate change is a “major scientific controversy”, and seems to steer clear of the actual science.
Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on “modules” for grades 10-12 on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy”), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”).
This “teach the controversy” approach (as opposed to teaching the actual science) seems similar to the anti-science effort of the Fraser Institute a couple of years back.
And most of Heartland’s funding sources have now been laid bare, with the notable exception of the tightly guarded identity of a single “anonymous donor” who has given $13 million over the last five years. Other donors range from the Charles Koch foundation down through several recognizable tobacco and pharmaceutical companies, and even Microsoft.
Here are three two of the most important released documents, with some highlights from each.
2012 Fundraising Plan (includes project descriptions)
Here are key excerpts from the Heartland’s the fund raising plan document, featuring two of 10 new and relaunched projects, and speak for themselves.
A major new project is the Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Schools.
Many people lament the absence of educational material suitable for K-12 students on global warming that isn’t alarmist or overtly political. Heartland has tried to make material available to teachers, but has had only limited success. Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. Moreover, material for classroom use must be carefully written to meet curriculum guidelines, and the amount of time teachers have for supplemental material is steadily shrinking due to the spread of standardized tests in K-12 education.
… Dr. [David] Wojick proposes to begin work on “modules” for grades 10-12 on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy”), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is
controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”). Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact (“environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather”), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.
The strategy also calls for continued support for the so-called Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) and its contributors. A major new edition is planned to counter the real IPCC’s Ar5, to be released in 2013.
Heartland sponsors the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), an international network of scientists who write and speak out on climate change. Heartland pays a team of scientists approximately $300,000 a year to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered, the most comprehensive and authoritative rebuttal of the United Nations’ IPCC reports. Another $88,000 is earmarked for Heartland staff, incremental expenses, and overhead for editing, expense reimbursement for the authors, and marketing.
NIPCC is currently funded by two gifts a year from two foundations, both of them requesting anonymity. In 2012 we plan to solicit gifts from other donors to add to what these two donors are giving in order to cover more of our fixed costs for promoting the first two Climate Change Reconsidered volumes and writing and editing the volume scheduled for release in 2013. We hope to raise $200,000 in 2012.
(For those interested, Mike Mann and Gavin Schmidt delivered a devastating critique of an earlier edition of the NIPCC back in 2008).
The 2012 budget document (see below) calls for monthly stipends to NIPCC editors Craig Idso ($11,600), Fred Singer ($5,000) and Robert Carter ($1,667).
Canadian NIPCC chapter authors listed as receiving ongoing Heartland support in the form of monthly stipends include:
- MadhavKhandekar (Chapter 1.3, Extreme Events, Environment Canada)
- Mitch Taylor (Chapter 2.2, Terrestrial Animals, Lakehead University)
Khandekar is best known as long time science advisor to the Alberta-based Friends of Science (and he’s long gone from Environment Canada, by the way). Taylor has been explaining to all who will listen (such as the Frontier Centre for Public Policy) that polar bears are thriving and not threatened by climate change.
[Discussion of the expanded communication strategy removed. ]
Heartland is planning a major boost in its fundraising efforts in 2012. But the document also shows the recent and projected donations of donors big and small.
Table 4 on p. 9 lists some fundraising events planned for 2012, including a lunch with John Stossel and an “Emerging Issues Forum” targeting state legislators that will piggyback on this year’s National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) meeting in Chicago. Heartland will even pay travel and hotel expenses for 70 legislators to attend the Forum.
But the document focuses on the prospects for tapping existing and new donors. By far the biggest donor is the revered “anonymous donor” who gave a disappointing $979,000 in 2011 after giving more than $12 million over 2007-2010. Heartland is hoping to up that to $1.25 million this year. That donor appears to have helped Heartland “ramp up” and was apparently a strong supporter of Heartland’s global warming conferences. No doubt, the identity of this deep-pocketed backer will give rise to much speculation.
The extensive list of existing donors to be targeted include (with previous donation year and amount in parentheses):
- Allied World Assurance Company Holdings (2011: $40,000)
- Altria Client Services, Inc. [Philip Morris parent] (2011: $50,000)
- AT&T for IT&T News (2010: $70,000)
- Charles Koch Foundation (2011: $25,000)
- Credit Union National Association (2011: $30,000) [not to be confused with the National Credit Union Association]
- Eli Lilly & Company (2010: $25,000)
- General Motors Foundation (2011: $15,000)
- Microsoft Corporation (2010: $0, 2011: $60,908)
- Nucor [Steel production & recycling] (2010: $400,000)
- Reynolds American Inc. (2011: $110,000)
The lists even name the main project of interest for each donor (although the acronyms are not evident at present). [These acronyms have been decoded below, and correspond mostly to various Heartland serial publications, along with some projects.]
2012 Heartland Budget
Heartland is projecting a boost in revenues from $4.6 million in 2011, to $7.7 million in 2012. That will enable an operating budget of $6.5 million, as well as topping up the fund balance a further $1.2 million. The new emphasis on fundraising is reflected in the more than doubling of that item from $338K in 2011 to $800K in 2012. Management and administration take $478K while”government relations” will have an eye-opening $539,158 (up from $$423.319 in 2011).
That last number especially will make it hard for Heartland to evade charges of carrying on in effect lobbying activities.
http://deepclimate.org/2012/02/14/heartland-insider-releases-budget-and-strategy-documents/
A little more conservative approach......
Is Turnabout Fair Play?
It’s hard to resist looking at the newly leaked documents from the contemptible Heartland Institute.
I was actually most shocked by their hand in trying to protect Governor Walker’s putsch in Wisconsin. “Angry Badger” indeed…
But shouldn’t people, no matter how nasty, get to keep their secrets? Is this ethically all that different from the CRU hacking? I’m serious. Those who think the CRU hacking was a perfectly fine thing need not respond.
UPDATE: The bit about “dissuading teachers from teaching science” was presumably just a sloppy edit, right? But then again, an embarrassing choice of words in a document intended to be private is not something that these guys would harp on for years on end, say if it came from a real scientist, right? So we surely shouldn’t make a fuss about this, right?
“Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. To counter this we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain- two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.”
- from the Climate Strategy document. (emphasisadded)
UPDATE – regardless of this revealing slip, (and of what the revealed documents imply about Heartland’s legitimacy as a 501c3 charitable organization, a topic that John Mashey has been pursuing assiduously),
Chris Mooney (in email, quoted with permission) spots perhaps the most surprising and most disturbing aspect of the documents in what is NOT there.
most of our ideological opponents think they’re actually right about the science, which means they would not want to prevent science from being taught, but rather prevent what they view as biased environmentalist science being taught. That there is no indication of this here is very, very striking.
UPDATE Feb 15: As is often the case with climate blogstorms, Adam Siegel is doing a good job of keeping up with
fresh links at Get Energy Smart Now.
UPDATE Feb 15: Not a peep out of Watts yet. This morning he is featuring
an especially clueless rant about El Nino instead. “It is infeasible that El Niño can arise from atmosphere and sun alone by warming this mass of water. Neither air temp or solar radiance change enough to cause this phenomena.” Well, yeah. “This phenomena” [sic] is caused by
an anomalous strengthening or weakening of the trade winds, leading to warm water increasingly sloshing over and piling up in the west Pacific, or the pile sloshing back over to the east, meanwhile reinforcing the trade wind anomaly so it becomes sticky. The system is reset when the positive El Nino phase (warm in the east) radiates extra heat into space. These vertical cross sections along the equator should give the idea. The “atmosphere and sun” are not alleged by anyone to “warm this mass of water” on the oscillation’s time scale. The denier explanation? Volcanoes.
UPDATE Feb 15: Bishop Hill seems to have had the
response delegated to him. “Nothing to see here,” is of course what they are saying. Given the context, that wears a little thin.
“dissuade teachers from teaching science”? “we sponsor the NIPCC to undermine the official United Nation’s IPCC reports”?(see below) “This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.”
Hmmm… Interesting positions for a non-profit to take.
Pity we don’t have ten years of emails to trawl through. Perhaps they’d release those?
UPDATE Feb 15: Watts
finally replies. My response:
1) I do not begrudge anyone funding for publicly exposing data in an honest and even-handed way. The general incapacity of the scientific institutions for doing so in a reasonable, up-to-date, convenient way is quite a legitimate point of complaint. And Watts may well do this honestly, because unlike Heartland in general, he appears to “buy his own dog food”. I can imagine how this could be mishandled, but I’m not one for prior restraint.
2) Watts has a very good point that Gore purportedly has $300 million (total) compared with Heartland’s 5 to 10 million per year. Is Gore’s counter-campaign ineffective, and if so why?
Both are good topics for further discussion, unlike the silliness that usually passes for science over at Watts’. But both of the above are clearly intended to deflect interest from Heartland’s obviously revealed indifference to the facts of the matter, and its as-suspected dubious status as a 501c3.
UPDATE Feb 15: Heartland Press Release:
Yesterday afternoon, two advocacy groups posted online several documents they claimed were The Heartland Institute’s 2012 budget, fundraising, and strategy plans. Some of these documents were stolen from Heartland, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered.
The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.
Since then, the documents have been widely reposted on the Internet, again with no effort to confirm their authenticity.
One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.
We respectfully ask all activists, bloggers, and other journalists to immediately remove all of these documents and any quotations taken from them, especially the fake “climate strategy” memo and any quotations from the same, from their blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.
The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents. We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation. We ask them in particular to immediately remove these documents and all statements about them from the blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.
How did this happen? The stolen documents were obtained by an unknown person who fraudulently assumed the identity of a Heartland board member and persuaded a staff member here to “re-send” board materials to a new email address. Identity theft and computer fraud are criminal offenses subject to imprisonment. We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes.
Apologies: The Heartland Institute apologizes to the donors whose identities were revealed by this theft. We promise anonymity to many of our donors, and we realize that the major reason these documents were stolen and faked was to make it more difficult for donors to support our work. We also apologize to Heartland staff, directors, and our allies in the fight to bring sound science to the global warming debate, who have had their privacy violated and their integrity impugned.
Lessons: Disagreement over the causes, consequences, and best policy responses to climate change runs deep. We understand that.
But honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.
Those persons who posted these documents and wrote about them before we had a chance to comment on their authenticity should be ashamed of their deeds, and their bad behavior should be taken into account when judging their credibility now and in the future.
===
RESPONSE: Heartland is challenging the veracity of the document containing all three of the most damning statements. I have no information about the provenance of these documents. Again, people who ought to know are saying that they are plausible, but that is hardly a proof of authenticity.
Heartland’s aggressive approach is interesting given their past position on the CRU hacking.
My main interest here is in trying to establish some good for the goose and good for the gander rules. Some people on both “sides” are reluctant to see any equivalence. Heartland, not surprisingly, is among them.
===
Borehole item(s).
http://planet3.org/2012/02/14/is-turnabout-fair-play/
My favorite post on this, tell it brother Peter. You are an angry fighter for the truth, and my friend now.
How is Joe Bast Like Joe Camel? Looks Like We’re Going to Find Out…..
February 15, 2012
How is Joe Bast like Joe Camel?
Well, let’s see – they both promote the sale of addictive poisons to children, they both are funded by the tobacco industry, and they both are leading proponents of the anti-science movement that threatens to cripple our education system and our economy.
Joe Bast is the President and CEO of the Heartland Institute, a right wing “think” tank in Chicago that has been the prime mover behind major disinformation initiatives on both global climate and tobacco dangers.
Mr. Bast is well known for insisting that the science of climate change is “science is very sketchy, very uncertain..”, as well as famously asserting that
“No victim of cancer, heart disease, etc. can “prove” his or her cancer or heart disease was caused by exposure to secondhand smoke.”
Not surprisingly, the Heartland has been the recipient of major funding from both
tobacco and
fossil fuel interests over the years.
We’re going to be finding out a lot more about the Heartland Institute and their operations in coming weeks and months, thanks to an anonymous whistleblower who, on Valentine’s Day, opened a gmail account,
sent a bundle of damning internal documents to key climate bloggers and researchers around the country, then closed the account and disappeared.
Now, in a statement, Heartland is admitting that the budget and donor documents are genuine, but claiming
that an alleged “Policy” paper is a forgery.
See the Documents here
Desmogblog:
It is clear from the documents that Heartland advocates against responsible climate mitigation and then uses that advocacy to raise money from oil companies and “other corporations whose interests are threatened by climate policies.” Heartland particularly celebrates the funding that it receives from the fossil fuel fortune being the Charles G. Koch Foundation.
Heartland also continues to collect money from Philip Morris parent company Altria as well as from the tobacco giant Reynolds American, while maintaining ongoing advocacy against policies related to smoking and health.
Heartland’s policy positions, strategies and budget distinguish it clear as a lobby firm that is misrepresenting itself as a “think tank” – it budgets $4.1 million of its $6.4 million in projected expenditures for Editorial, Government Relations, Communications, Fundraising, and Publications, and the only activity it plans that could vaguely be considered policy development is the writing of a curriculum package for use in confusing high schoolers about climate change.
Among the documents were tantalizing clues as to where major funding for the climate denial movement is coming from, and who it’s going to.
The information is flying faster than any one person can keep up.
As stated above, Heartland has now
released a statement claiming that one of the alleged internal documents is a fake. It’s worth noting that several credible sources have pronounced the material genuine. I will keep updating the situation as best I can.
Joe Romm at ClimateProgress:
Racing around the internet are some internal documents that appear to be from the Heartland Institute, a relatively obscure hard-core anti-science think tank. As DeSmogBlog explains, “An anonymous donor calling him (or her)self ‘Heartland Insider’ has released the Heartland Institute’s budget, fundraising plan… and sundry other documents (all attached) that prove all of the worst allegations that have been levelled against the organization.”
Personally, I was skeptical of these docs, at least until I read the 2012 Fundraising Plan, which attacks the temperature station data of the “the National Aeronautics and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).” That kind of error is classic Heartland.
And here’s another apparent blunder: “The Charles G. Koch Foundation returned as a Heartland donor in 2011. We expect to ramp up their level of support in 2012 and gain access to the network of philanthropists they work with.”
Those Heartland folks are such satirists. Philanthropy “etymologically means the love of humanity,” whereas funding climate denial and inaction, as the Kochs do, is perhaps the cruelest thing you could possibly do to humanity.
My colleague Brad Johnson has just blogged on Heartland’s “Secret, Corporate-Funded Plan To Teach Children That Climate Change Is A Hoax,” which I’ll excerpt at the end. It’s funny in the way that The Shining was funny.
These documents just make no sense, kind of like climate science denial itself. Perhaps this is a spoof put out by The Onion.
An alleged document that is being examined, and which
Heartland now states is a fake – describes a plan to pay a consultant 100,000 dollars to prepare a program designed for ”dissuading teachers from teaching science”.
Earlier today,
ThinkProgress reported that a Heartland insider had confirmed the document and explained its rationale:
James M. Taylor, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, told ThinkProgress Green in an e-mail why the group is developing its denier curriculum:
We are concerned that schools are teaching climate change issues in a manner that is not consistent with sound science and that is designed to lead students to the erroneous belief that humans are causing a global warming crisis. We hope that our efforts will restore sound science to climate change education and discourage the political propaganda that too often passes as “education”.
In
Heartland’s statement, it is acknowledged that that budget and donor information are genuine, and apologizes for the security breach.
Apologies: The Heartland Institute apologizes to the donors whose identities were revealed by this theft. We promise anonymity to many of our donors, and we realize that the major reason these documents were stolen and faked was to make it more difficult for donors to support our work. We also apologize to Heartland staff, directors, and our allies in the fight to bring sound science to the global warming debate, who have had their privacy violated and their integrity impugned.
Ironically, Heartland’s position seems to be that stealing electronic documents from right wing think tanks are viewed as a serious crime, while stealing emails from climate scientists and University labs are considered behavior to be lauded and encouraged.
How did this happen? The stolen documents were obtained by an unknown person who fraudulently assumed the identity of a Heartland board member and persuaded a staff member here to “re-send” board materials to a new email address. Identity theft and computer fraud are criminal offenses subject to imprisonment. We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes.
UPDATES: More good takes sprouting up all over -
http://climatecrocks.com/2012/02/15/how-is-joe-bast-like-joe-camel-looks-like-were-going-to-find-out/
We now live in an Orwellian world where up is down and left is right and one's science is more concerned with one's finances and political leanings than lab results. The results, instead of applying American creativity and ingenuity to solve problems we spend all our resources fighting over whether they really exist, and the rest of the world passes up by like a crazy man on the sidewalk looking in the sky, and crying out the sky is falling, no wait it isnt, it is falling over and over again. We have become non competitive in many fields, with alternative energy being one of them because of this garbage. All to jeep the status quo, which is impossible to do in a chnaging world.
I had some concerns over global warming theory. I know the earth is getting warmer and the climate more viotile, and that our carbon emissions can not be helping the issue. My question is how much impact do we really have and can we really do anything about it. We know that the earth's climate is really very unstable and the last 1000 years are the most stable in history with the last 100 the most stable and predictable century. So my question was what is that is all just coming to an end anyway as part of a natural cycle. Then a show a show on NOVA on PBS (Where I try to get real science) about global dimming, or how the sun is actually less bright now.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/
This leaves no doubt that we are screwing up the climate and causing global warming even though it is not about global warming. Just watch it, iy is scarier than Friday the 13th to me. By the way, who funded this show and NOVA?
Funding for NOVA is provided by
ExxonMobil, David H. Koch, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and public television viewers.
Makes you go, hummmmmmm. Maybe the oil industry isnt really the total villian here.
View full sizeFILE - Bags of oil collected by clean up crews that washed up on the coastline of Dauphin Island, Ala. Tuesday June 1, 2010 as oil leaking from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead continues to spread in the Gulf of Mexico. Since the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig, a disaster scenario has emerged with millions of gallons of crude oil spewing unchecked into the Gulf and moving inexorably northward to the coast. (Press-Register, John David Mercer) 
