Leak exposes how Heartland Institute works to undermine climate science.

[steph]

Leak exposes how Heartland Institute works to undermine climate science. The inner workings of a libertarian thinktank working to discredit the established science on climate change have been exposed by a leak of confidential documents detailing its strategy and fundraising networks. The Guardian, United Kingdom.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/15/leak-exposes-heartland-institute-climate

From today's Above the fold. News aggregated bywww.EnvironmentalHealthNews.org

[theindependenteye]

>>>Leak exposes how Heartland Institute works to undermine climate science. The inner workings of a libertarian thinktank working to discredit the established science on climate change have been exposed by a leak of confidential documents detailing its strategy and fundraising networks. The Guardian, United Kingdom.

Isn't it inspiring to see someone spending all that money just out of the goodness of their hearts just for the sake of the truth? I thought hiring someone to say you're right is what free speech is all about.

Cheers-
Conrad

[Star Man]

Leak exposes how Heartland Institute works to undermine climate science. The inner workings of a libertarian thinktank working to discredit the established science on climate change have been exposed by a leak of confidential documents detailing its strategy and fundraising networks. The Guardian, United Kingdom.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/15/leak-exposes-heartland-institute-climate

From today's Above the fold. News aggregated bywww.EnvironmentalHealthNews.org

The article details how the Koch brothers, multibillionaire owners of Koch Industries and inheritors of their father's oil business, have bankrolled Heartland and how other corporations have given millions of dollars to the think (sic) tank. We humans don't stand much of a chance against the power of the corporations. We humans also don't benefit in any material way from the business of Big Energy. I would love to see Big Oil and Big Gas nationalized.

Star Man

[geomancer]

[who to believe when likely liars say they are not lying?]

Heartland Institute Responds to Stolen and Fake Documents
February 15, 2012
Jim Lakely

FEBRUARY 15, 2012 – The following statement from The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more information, contact Communications Director Jim Lakely at [email protected] and 312/377-4000.

---

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.

---

The Heartland Institute is a 28-year-old national nonprofit organization with offices in Chicago, Illinois and Washington, DC. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site or call 312/377-4000.

[geomancer]

I followed Star Man's link to the Environmental Health News site and found these links, all likely targets of Heartland's threats:

https://www.environmentalhealthnews....heartland&ss=1

Also, this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/s...-teaching.html

Leak Offers Glimpse of Campaign Against Climate Science

The documents, from a nonprofit organization in Chicago called the Heartland Institute, outline plans to promote a curriculum that would cast doubt on the scientific finding that fossil fuel emissions endanger the long-term welfare of the planet. “Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective,” one document said.

While the documents offer a rare glimpse of the internal thinking motivating the campaign against climate science, defenders of science education were preparing for battle even before the leak. Efforts to undermine climate-science instruction are beginning to spread across the country, they said, and they fear a long fight similar to that over the teaching of evolution in public schools.

In a statement, the Heartland Institute acknowledged that some of its internal documents had been stolen. But it said its president had not had time to read the versions being circulated on the Internet on Tuesday and Wednesday and was therefore not in a position to say whether they had been altered.

Heartland did declare one two-page document to be a forgery, although its tone and content closely matched that of other documents that the group did not dispute. In an apparent confirmation that much of the material, more than 100 pages, was authentic, the group apologized to donors whose names became public as a result of the leak.

The documents included many details of the group’s operations, including salaries, recent personnel actions and fund-raising plans and setbacks. They were sent by e-mail to leading climate activists this week by someone using the name “Heartland insider” and were quickly reposted to many climate-related Web sites.

Heartland said the documents were not from an insider but were obtained by a caller pretending to be a board member of the group who was switching to a new e-mail address. “We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes,” the organization said.

Although best-known nationally for its attacks on climate science, Heartland styles itself as a libertarian organization with interests in a wide range of public-policy issues. The documents say that it expects to raise $7.7 million this year.
The documents raise questions about whether the group has undertaken partisan political activities, a potential violation of federal tax law governing nonprofit groups. For instance, the documents outline “Operation Angry Badger,” a plan to spend $612,000 to influence the outcome of recall elections and related fights this year in Wisconsin over the role of public-sector unions.

Tax lawyers said Wednesday that tax-exempt groups were allowed to undertake some types of lobbying and political education, but that because they are subsidized by taxpayers, they are prohibited from direct involvement in political campaigns.

The documents also show that the group has received money from some of the nation’s largest corporations, including several that have long favored action to combat climate change.

The documents typically say that those donations were earmarked for projects unrelated to climate change, like publishing right-leaning newsletters on drug and technology policy. Nonetheless, several of the companies hastened on Wednesday to disassociate themselves from the organization’s climate stance.

“We absolutely do not endorse or support their views on the environment or climate change,” said Sarah Alspach, a spokeswoman for GlaxoSmithKline, a multinational drug company shown in the documents as contributing $50,000 in the past two years to support a medical newsletter.

A spokesman for Microsoft, another listed donor, said that the company believes that “climate change is a serious issue that demands immediate worldwide action.” The company is shown in the documents as having contributed $59,908 last year to a Heartland technology newsletter. But the Microsoft spokesman, Mark Murray, said the gift was not a cash contribution but rather the value of free software, which Microsoft gives to thousands of nonprofit groups.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Heartland documents was what they did not contain: evidence of contributions from the major publicly traded oil companies, long suspected by environmentalists of secretly financing efforts to undermine climate science.

But oil interests were nonetheless represented. The documents say that the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation contributed $25,000 last year and was expected to contribute $200,000 this year. Mr. Koch is one of two brothers who have been prominent supporters of libertarian causes as well as other charitable endeavors. They control Koch Industries, one of the country’s largest private companies and a major oil refiner.

The documents suggest that Heartland has spent several million dollars in the past five years in its efforts to undermine climate science, much of that coming from a person referred to repeatedly in the documents as “the Anonymous Donor.” A guessing game erupted Wednesday about who that might be.

The documents say that over four years ending in 2013, the group expects to have spent some $1.6 million on financing the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, an entity that publishes periodic reports attacking climate science and holds lavish annual conferences. (Environmental groups refer to the conferences as “Denialpalooza.”)
Heartland’s latest idea, the documents say, is a plan to create a curriculum for public schools intended to cast doubt on mainstream climate science and budgeted at $200,000 this year. The curriculum would claim, for instance, that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy.”

It is in fact not a scientific controversy. The vast majority of climate scientists say that emissions generated by humans are changing the climate and putting the planet at long-term risk, although they are uncertain about the exact magnitude of that risk. Whether and how to rein in emissions of greenhouse gases has become a major political controversy in the United States, however.

The National Center for Science Education, a group that has had notable success in fighting for accurate teaching of evolution in the public schools, has recently added climate change to its agenda in response to pleas from teachers who say they feel pressure to water down the science.

Mark S. McCaffrey, programs and policy director for the group, which is in Oakland, Calif., said the Heartland documents revealed that “they continue to promote confusion, doubt and debate where there really is none.”

Steven Yaccino contributed reporting from Chicago.

[rossmen]

ok so publicly traded oil companies are not funding heartland. this is good news! heartland is more like hinderland, out on the edge of nowhere, spending a few million over a few years as a last collective gasp of human caused climate denial. of course this has a place on wacco, where we like to think out of the box, even if out of the box sometimes means out of touch with reality.........

I followed Star Man's link to the Environmental Health News site and found these links, all likely targets of Heartland's threats:

https://www.environmentalhealthnews....heartland&ss=1

Also, this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/s...-teaching.html

Leak Offers Glimpse of Campaign Against Climate Science
....

[steph]

NATURE NEWS BLOG
‘Climate-gate’ researchers enter Heartland debate

19 Feb 2012

Leading climate scientists have told the controversial Heartland Institute to take a long hard look at itself, after a damning set of documents purported to be from the think-tank were leaked online.
The free-market Heartland Institute has mounted “a systematic attack on mainstream climate science”, in the word’s of Nature’s Jeff Tollefson, who profiled the organization in a feature last year.
Now several documents – whose veracity is disputed by the institute – surfaced earlier this week on the DeSmogBlog, allegedly showing its budget, fund-raising plan, and strategy outline.
Today, an open letter from seven researchers whose emails featured in the stolen ‘climate-gate’ documents that were posted online in 2009 and 2011 say that “although we can agree that stealing documents and posting them online is not an acceptable practice, we would be remiss if we did not point out that the Heartland Institute has had no qualms about utilizing and distorting emails stolen from scientists”.
continued at:
https://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/0...nd-debate.html

[Hotspring 44]

NATURE NEWS BLOG
‘Climate-gate’ researchers enter Heartland debate

19 Feb 2012

Leading climate scientists have told the controversial Heartland Institute to take a long hard look at itself, after a damning set of documents purported to be from the think-tank were leaked online....
...continued at:
https://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/02/‘climate-gate’-researchers-enter-heartland-debate.html

And, in that blog there is a statement that was reportedly made from "Heartland Institute" ("The Heartland Institute says the documents released this week amount to ‘an online mugging’, and that one is a fake. Others were “stolen”, it says, by someone pretending to be a Heartland board member who persuaded a staff member to send them to a new email address.
It has asked “all activists, bloggers, and other journalists” to remove the documents and any quotations from them from the internet and other publications and said it plans to “pursue charges and collect payment for damages” from people who commented on the documents.").

Anyway, don't the "AGW deniers" realize that sometimes 'what comes around goes around'?
They seem to be such crybabies on this one.
What () is the matter with them? I think that their way of cry babying is a veiled form of bullying!
They are in my view so maximally disingenuous :nosegrowlie: that they (Heartland Institute) really don't deserve any plus-side credibility points on this one.
Re: the Open Letter to the Heartland Institute from an open letter from seven researchers; for example:

"We know what it feels like to have private information stolen and posted online via illegal
hacking.
It happened to climate researchers in 2009 and again in 2011. Personal emails were
culled through and taken out of context before they were posted online.
In 2009, the Heartland Institute was among the groups that spread false allegations about what these stolen emails said.
Despite multiple independent investigations, which demonstrated that allegations against
scientists were false, the Heartland Institute continued to attack scientists based on the stolen
emails.
When more stolen emails were posted online in 2011, the Heartland Institute again pointed to their release and spread false claims about scientists."

BTW, I added the bold, underlining, color, and font sizing to the quoted wording for emphasis.

Based on the information I have at this point in time; this is what I have to say: When in the pig sty slinging "shit-mud" and you (Heartland Institute) open your mouth; don't expect it to taste like anything other than the shit-mud it is when that same "shit-mud" you slung ends-up going in your direction and ends-up; whereat, back on your tongue.

[steph]

Gleick apology over Heartland leak stirs ethics debate among climate scientists
Scientist Peter Gleick apologises for 'serious lapse in judgment and ethics', but supporters say Heartland remains the villain

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 21 February 2012 19.04 GMT

https://www.guardian.co.uk/environme...?newsfeed=true