Photo:SoftPIX_Techie, Creative Commons, Flickr
This week, a conservative American think tank known as the Heartland Institute send out about 12,000 brochures and DVDs to Canadian schools urging teachers to correct the record on global warming.
According to the institute, the schools were targeted through a purchased database.
Heartland insists the sun, rather than human activity, is the driving force behind earth’s current warming trend, and wants teachers to instruct their students accordingly. This unsolicited information is, in Heartland’s words, an attempt to inject some balance into an issue fraught with hysteria and doomsday scenarios, where scientists are “deeply divided” on the true causes of warming. Neither the brochures or DVDs reference the fact that the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), prepared by scientists and governments worldwide, is almost unanimous in its conclusion that global warming is real and its cause is human activity.
Photo: jalalspages, Creative Commons, Flickr
In fact, according to John Stone, a Canadian senior researcher on the IPCC bureau, the 2007 assessment was surprisingly cautious, particularly in regard to melting ice sheets and sun activity, the latter assessed by the IPCC at a mere 10-percent affect, as compared to increasing greenhouse gases. Stone attributes the caution to participating scientists that are concerned about being proven wrong. I can relate; I’m only a writer, and I live in fear of being proven wrong all the time.
Based in Chicago, Ill. (hence their name), Heartland and its mixed bag of scholars, headed by founder Joseph Bast, thinks the human link to global warming is a policy of paranoia. The brochures and DVDs reflect this bias by detailing the results of several, international surveys of climate scientists between 1996 and 2003. The title of the DVD – Unstoppable Solar Cycles: The Real Story of Greenland – purports to prove that we’ve been here (with global warming) before. We have, but we weren’t burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon dioxide at the rate of nearly 30 billion tons a year and rising. In fact, we were barely here at all, at least in terms of population.
The report might be credible except for several large, self-serving, and erroneous issues lying at Heartland’s door. The first, and perhaps picayune, is that Heartland’s president and CEO, Joseph Bast, hired his wife as Heartland’s publications director. Nepotism does tend to make one skeptical. The second is that Heartland is partly funded (to the tune of almost $800,000 over the last 10 years) by Exxon Mobil, an energy company with a vested interest – like most energy companies nowadays – in proving that warming is not due to burning fossil fuels. Heartland also has deep and abiding ties to the tobacco industry, but as that is unrelated to warming, I’d prefer to let it pass.
In March of 2008 Heartland sponsored an international conference on climate change in New York. The timing was propitious, coming as it did after the coldest winter in a decade, but the conference itself was questionable from both a financial and ethical perspective. Those who attended were provided with two days of free lodging and meals and a $300 stipend to cover expenses. The invitation letter, aimed at attracting both government and scientific representatives, clearly stated its intention as "generating attention to the fact that that many scientists believe forecasts of rapid warming and catastrophic events are not supported by sound science, and that expensive campaigns to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are not necessary or cost-effective”. This conference, which the online newspaper The Independent charges was paid for by oil and tobacco, was not the open-minded approach of a scholarly organization but a sales pitch for further relaxing emissions rules to benefit energy companies.
The most damning evidence against Heartland, however, comes from a 2007 report called: 500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares, which was later debunked by Kevin Grandia of desmogblog, who sent letters to the scientists referenced and asked if they did indeed support the report’s conclusions. A large number replied, quite angrily, denouncing the report and asking that their names be removed. That isn’t science. It isn’t even good fiction. It’s libel.
Most curious is Heartland’s targeting of Canada. Not just schools, but also 200 influential Canadian decision-makers, including Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. I suspect that Heartland (which bills itself a national nonprofit research and education organization) has just been hired as the mouthpiece for a bigger push into the Athasbascan Tar Sands of Alberta, Canada. The move is,apparently supported by Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, if his approach to global warming politics is any indication.
Meanwhile, the Andean ice cap is melting, Russia’s ancient Lake Baikal is heating up and a new BBC report suggests tropical insects are likely to become extinct if warming continues. The BBC also reports that scientists have concluded that there is no sun link to climate change.
All this, and Heartland’s Senior Fellow James Taylor insists that there is no scientific consensus that humans are causing any substantial warming (or any future global warming that mankind should be concerned about). Leading some to conclude that being pig-headed is almost as effective as being right.
Disclosure: I don’t own energy stocks.