Brendan DeMelle

Post image for DeSmog Blog’s Bogus Exposé of the Heartland Institute

Updated February 18, 12:34 a.m.

Earlier this week, the climate hysterics at DeSmog Blog and ThinkProgress tried (but failed) to manufacture a scandal by posting board-meeting and fund-raising documents stolen under false pretenses from the Heartland Institute, the Illinois-based free-market think tank. You can read Heartland’s response to the document heist here.

In the climate debate, Heartland is perhaps best known as organizer and host of six international climate conferences and as publisher of Climate Change Reconsidered: The Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

The Heartland conferences transformed the disparate ranks of climate-alarm skeptics into a confident, energized, networked movement. The NIPCC report and related publications not only debunk Al Gore’s “planetary emergency” but also provide the only comprehensive, fully-documented alternative to the alleged “scientific consensus” represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

So it’s not hard to understand why eco-bloggers are desperate to sully Heartland’s good name and damage the Institute’s funding. But, it turns out, one of the documents is a fake, one of the facts headlined in the exposé is an error, and all that the documents show is what everybody already knows: Heartland seeks financial support from like-minded individuals, foundations, and corporations to combat climate alarmist propaganda, and, to its credit, generously seeks to help fund other worthy organizations to build the larger movement of which it is a part. [click to continue…]