Workings of climate science attack machine exposed - GUARDIAN

The funding of climate cynicism by fossil fuel industries is nothing new, and it has been reported several times in the media, as well as on gather. Heartland, btw, also denies the link between second-hand smoke and cancer. It is a self-described, free-market think-tank, pretending (like CATO, AEI, the Heritage Foundation, and the Marshall Institute) to know something about science. In the meantime, it is almost humorous to see politically motivated "institutes" claiming that scientists play politcs with science.

Heartland has been exposed as funding the denialist industry lobby, including people like Fred Singer, Anthony Watts, Craig Idso and other denialist mouthpieces.

Since the original site keeps going down due to overload (probably because Heartland has instructed its blogger network to try to shut down the site), another good source of information is the Skeptical Science site.

The material posted includes actual Heartland internal memos describing how a single "anonymous donor" has contributed millions of dollars to the denialist lobby's war chest, how the billionaire Koch brothers (who also fund and organize the tea party) have also contributed large amounts of money, and how they use their network of paid disinformationists to confuse the public. Even to the point of hiring a guy to write false school lessons to be fed to grade schoolers.

This memo details payments to individuals and other front organizations to disinform.

Note that no effort is made to publish actual science in actual scientific journals. It is all geared towards lobbying the public and lobbying politicians and policy-makers. And all designed to stop any honest discussion of policy options that might impact their billionaire and corporate funders.

Of course, David fails to mention that the most damaging document was a fake, but then David is in the business of failing to mention.

Here is what the always lucid warmist Roger Pielke Jr has to say on the matter:

Reality is Not Good Enough

The entire Heartland document episode has become far more interesting than a typical tale of an advocacy group paying off shills now that it seems clear that one of the documents that was leaked was in fact a fake. Megan McArdle at The Atlantic does a heroic job examining the documents (something that apparently most reporters failed to do) and concludes that it is fake (I agree):

The memo doesn't add new facts, just new spin. Naturally, because the spin is more lurid, it's what a lot of the climate blogs seized on.

If the faked document happened to be produced by a climate activist or scientist (as some are already suggesting), then the leaked Heartland documents will go down in history as one of the more spectacular own goals in the history of the climate debate (with the consequences proportional to the stature of the faker). The faking is likely to overshadow whatever legitimate questions may have been raised by the release of the documents. Imagine what would have happened if the UEA hacker/leaker had made up a few emails to spice up the dossier.

More generally, the episode already illustrates much of what has become of the activist wing of the climate science community -- Apparently, reality is not good enough, so it must be sexed up. This sort of thing feeds into the worst imaginings of skeptics and blinds them to the fact that there are real issues here despite the frequent over-egging of the pudding.

I am curious, how does this compare to The Sierra Club taking $26 million from the natural gas industry to advocate against coal?

See NYT: Answering for Taking a Driller’s Cash

But then taking money for advocacy is par for the course. But who knows where following the money might lead? Someday, someone might start asking why so many Goldman-Sachs alumni pepper the boards of the environmental movement?

Greg,
The warmageddonists whine about money sceptics take from fossil fuel industries but forget that money is small change compared to the $£€ pumped into the climate scaremongering industry by governments, the United Nations etc.

Don't know about over there but where I come from we call it hypocrisy.

Ian, Andrew Bolt spoke to that yesterday.

The problem with the great international conspiracy of climate sceptics is that it’s so small and innocent that a disappointed warmist who steals documents from the Heartland Institute finds they must fake the main one to get media attention.

IMHO, the reason for this self-inflicted wound was the intolerance of doubt.

A robust faith takes doubt in stride, it is only the fundamentalists who because they take everything literally, cannot tolerate a whisper of doubt.

Actually, information in the memo being questioned has been independently verified and is, in fact, documented in Heartland's own budget numbers. Individuals listed have admitted they received exactly what the memo says they received, and again, confirmed in Heartland's own budget numbers. In fact, all the memo seems to do is summarize what Heartland's budget shows in a lot more pages.

So let's recap:

1) Heartland admits that they accidentally emailed the budgetary documents intended for the Board to someone posing as a Board member.

2) Now Heartland is trying to rewrite reality, as they tend to do, by claiming that they were stolen. Unfortunately, they have already admitted that their release was apparently due to a lack of internal checks and balances on confidential materials. Were they duped? Apparently so. But being duped and sending out confidential materials to people not approved to get them is not the same as stolen.

3) Heartland's budget - which they have not denied - documents the data that is in a summary document that Heartland claims is "a fake." So, they say, this fake document just happens to accurately reflect Heartland's own budgetary numbers and language. [i.e., while the origin of the summary may be in question, the facts apparently are not]

4) Realizing how damaging the budgetary documents are - and covering for the fact that they accidentally emailed these confidential documents to someone other than a Board member - Heartland is now trying to get everyone to focus solely on the one document of uncertain origin...the one whose statements and numbers are confirmed by Heartland's own budget.

The goal, of course, is to distract from the honest discussion of Heartland's own budgetary documents. Documents that confirm Heartland receives substantial funding from fossil fuel interests and doles out those funds to a series of front groups and spokespeople whose role is to keep "manufacture doubt" about the science.

In other words, Heartland is doing what they do - use fossil fuel funds to lobby against the science in order to block honest discussion of policy options that might be adverse to their corporate and fossil fuel member corporations.

That's what lobbyists do.

What they don't do is science.

BTW, this part of your comment is particularly funny:

Imagine what would have happened if the UEA hacker/leaker had made up a few emails to spice up the dossier.

In fact, the denialist industry did cherry pick pieces of emails and string them together to create a fake context that completely changed their meaning. So not only was the fakegate contrivance an actual theft (unlike Heartland itself accidentally sending confidential documents), but the denialist industry intentionally lied about the content of the emails.

In contrast, the documents Heartland accidentally emailed out were posted online in their entirety for everyone to see in their proper context. And even the one short summary document that Heartland now claims is "fake" contains information that has been independently verified by several of the recipients of the funds denoted and by Heartland's own budget numbers.

Greg,

While I agree with much of what you say here, this I do not;

"A robust faith takes doubt in stride, it is only the fundamentalists who because they take everything literally, cannot tolerate a whisper of doubt."

No, it is fundamental to science that one doubt unproven theories, that's the basic scientific approach itself really. I believe you may be conflating the concept of a "fanatic", with the concept of a fundamentalist. Fundamentalism is critical to legitimate scientific inquiry, but it has nothing to do with taking anything literally, or not.

(And, I believe, conflating the concept that actual religious fundamentalists are those who claim to be fundamentalists , rather than those who actually understand and practice the fundamental aspects of a religion. True "fundamentalist" Christians for instance, do not "take everything literally" that's in the Bible, precisely because it's obvious (and clearly stated often) that everything in the Book is not meant to be taken literally. It is quite clearly indicated that there's all sorts of metaphor, symbolism, parabolic analogy, and so forth in it. Taking the whole Book literally would be a violation of one of the fundamentals of the religion, sitting right there in plain sight. Some form of fanatic might do that, but no true fundamentalist would even think twice about departing from a purely literal reading of the words throughout the whole Book, and do so on a very routine basis . . I have no doubt anyway ; )


What is really happening in this catastrophic AGW realm I believe, is that many people are buying into the notion that to be scientific, means one accepts as fact/truth some supposed consensus of opinion among scientists. Nope, that's exactly what a scientifically minded person sets aside, so as to be objective about the evidence they themselves are examining. Accepting without doubt some supposed consensus is just being a fan of the Science establishment really . .

Thanks Clark,

Thank you for posting.

Leaked Docs From Heartland Institute Cause a Stir—but Is One a Fake? (Fool Aid)