heartland

PERHAPS somebody should write a pocket guide book with the title: "How to spot you've been suckered by a fake grassroots movement".

Once it's written, these guide books could be distributed free of charge to crowds at anti-carbon tax rallies, US Tea Party marches and pretty much any gathering of a "movement" telling you that you're freedom is being put at risk by big governments, nanny states, new world orders or communists disguised as climate scientists or public health professionals.

But why the sudden need for the guide?

There's now emerging evidence that if these really are "grassroots" movements, then many of the seeds and the fertilisers are being supplied by major corporations and "libertarian" billionaires. It turns out that the US Tea Party movement and its calls for "freedom" from government intervention wasn't some organic uprising of community concern after all.

A new academic study documents how the Tea Party was envisioned and planned by tobacco company executives in concert with Citizens for a Sound Economy, a group established by oil billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch.

As reported on DeSmogBlog, the study "‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third-party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party" shows how the industry wanted to hide their profit motive and fear of the government regulating their deadly products behind a "movement to change the way that people think", as R.J Reynolds Tobacco's head of national field operations Tim Hyde described it.

Following the May 4 shocking Unabomber billboard campaign and subsequent departures of more of Heartland's corporate donors, Heartland was likely heartened to add the Illinois Coal Association as a new Gold Sponsor for its forthcoming ICCC-7 "climate" conference.  Although ICA was not on the 05/09/12 sponsor list,  it joined the usual collection of thinktank sponsors  no later than 05/14/12,  Maybe the billboard finally convinced them to come out publicly?

In the 2012 Fundraising plan p.24,  Murray Energy gave $100,000 in 2010 and was expected to give $40,000 in 2012.   Its subsidiary, The American Coal Company is a member of the ICA, along with Peabody Energy and Arch Coal, among others.

In the PDF at Fake science, fakexperts, funny finances, free of tax, pp.84-85 I showed Heartland's Environment and Climate News to have consistent views on some topics:

Negatives included the EPA (2160 mentions), renewable (761), wind farm (333), wind power (277), solar power (209), wind turbine (188).

Mercury (941 mentions) was generally viewed as OK, in fish or the environment, unless it came from CFLs.  Coal (935) was often praised.

In any case, the ICA's post-billboard sponsorship of ICCC-7 is a bold public leap.

The NY Times, LA Times and many others criticized Heartland’s inept plan to hire David Wojick to create an alternate-reality K-12 climate science curriculum. But Heartland's school ground attack on science is nothing new, as is evident in the organization's own commentary: “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.”

One of the best known Heartland incursions into the schoolyard occurred in 2008, when the institute mailed teaching materials to 11,250 schools in Canada. In 2009, Science derided Heartland for sending copies of The Skeptic’s Handbook to 14,000 US school board officials. Heartland's Environment and Climate New mocked one school board president for his refusal to use it. 

But Heartland began its classroom misinformation campaign much earlier. During 2002-2003, E&CN ran ads exhorting readers to “discuss an E&CN article with your school-age child... and his or her teacher.” I hope parents avoided the common “Smoker’s Lounge” ads in those issues.

Willie Soon has been an individual of significant interest lately in climate circles. Last week, he spoke at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate change, or as we like to call it, Denial-a-Palooza. A recent Greenpeace report found that Soon accepted over $1 million in funding from fossil fuel interests, including Koch Industries. 

To top it off, RealClimate released a report yesterday revealing new issues with Soon’s 2007 paper on polar bears. The non-peer-reviewed paper has been cited extensively before, notably by Sarah Palin, as proof that polar bears are not endangered by global warming. The paper includes skeptical co-authors M.G. Dyck, R.K. Baydack, David Legates, Sallie Baliunas, Tim Ball and L.O. Hancocks.

While the paper's central claims have already been disproven, the remaining issue is what appears to be Soon's willing disregard for data. RealClimate found that Soon had cherry picked data showing the highest level of Arctic Oscillation (AO), a natural variability that he blamed for any increases in temperature in the Hudson Bay area: