Heartland Institute – the Keystone Cops Of Climate Science Denial – Strike Again

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THEREโ€™S a section on the Heartland Instituteโ€™s website pointing readers to โ€œStuff We Wish Weย Wroteโ€.

After events over the last year or so, the chaps at the fossil fuel-funded โ€œthink tankโ€ might want to add a new section with the title โ€œStuff We Wish We Hadnโ€™tย Wroteโ€.

The Heartland Institute, for those who donโ€™t know, is a Chicago-based group promoting any view or position that argues we shouldnโ€™t do anything about human-caused climate change. They run campaigns, hold conferences, write op-eds in the media and pay contrarianย scientists.

Right there on the think-tankโ€™s homepage, the group proudly displays a quote from The Economist magazine describing Heartland as โ€œThe world’s most prominent think-tank promoting scepticism about man-made climateย change.โ€

Yet as is the case with most things Heartland says about climate change, things are not always as they seem. Heartlandโ€™s boastful quote is taken out of context and comes from this article in The Economist, documenting a spectacular own goal byย Heartland.

Heartland, The Economist wrote, had lost an estimated $825,000 in funding after running a billboard campaign that equated acceptance of human-caused global warming to the values of serial killer Ted โ€œUnabomberโ€ย Kaczynski.

So when The Economist was describing Heartland as a prominent think-tank promoting climate science denial, it wasnโ€™t doing it in a good way. No wonder then that Heartland didnโ€™t hyperlink theย quote.

This brings us to Heartlandโ€™s most recent example of self-aggrandizing โ€“ implying the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) thinks theyโ€™re awesome because it translated two of Heartlandโ€™s reports, only to be told by aforementioned academy to apologise for misrepresenting what they had actually done. Here are the nuts and bolts of the story. On June 11, Heartland released a statement detailing how CAS had translated two volumes of its NIPCC reportsย  โ€“ Climate Change Reconsidered.

The main contributors to the reports, contrarian scientists Craig idso, Fred Singer and Australia-based Robert Carter, were due to fly to Beijing to launch the report, Heartland said. Internal Heartland documents have shown that in 2012, Heartland planned to pay Idso $11,600 a month for his work on the NIPCC report. Singer was to receive $5,000 per month and Carter would get $1,667ย monthly.

On June 12, Jim Lakely, Heartlandโ€™s communications director, took to the think-tankโ€™s blog – โ€œSomewhat Reasonableโ€ – with unfettered excitement. Under the headline โ€œChinese Academy of Sciences publishes Heartland Institute research skeptical of Global Warmingโ€ Lakely wrote that CASโ€™s translation now placed โ€œenormous scientific heftโ€ behind the โ€œquestionable notion that man is responsible for catastrophically warming theย planetโ€.

In a typically restrained and understated manner, Lakely quotes Heartland President Joseph Bast as saying: โ€œThis is a historic moment in the global debate about globalย warming.โ€

Bast then tries to drive a wedge between China and other countries involved in United Nations negotiations to agree a deal to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. Chinaโ€™s previous refusal to sign a deal, Bast claimed, was now justified because CAS had translated the Heartland book and this โ€œindicates the countryโ€™s leaders believe their position is justified by science and not just byย economics.โ€

Professor Carter told Lakely that Chinese companies would soon leave their Western counterparts in the competitive dust becuase, he said, they were still โ€œhindered by the IPCCโ€™s leaden and outdate global warmingย ideologyโ€.

Climate sceptic blogger Anthony Watts was similarly excitable, running a post with the title โ€œHeartlandโ€™s NIPCC report to be accepted by Chinese Academy of Sciences in special ceremonyโ€. That these statements were published on a Heartland blog with the title โ€œSomewhat Reasonableโ€ seems beautifully ironic, given what followed. Presumably finding Heartlandโ€™s actions Somewhat Unreasonable, the Lanzhou Branch of the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which carried out the translation, released a statement. Itย read:

โ€ฆthe Heartland Institute published the news titled โ€œChinese Academy of Sciences publishes Heartland Institute research skeptical of Global Warmingโ€ in a strongly misleading way on its website, implying that the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) supports their views, in contrary to what is clearly stated in the Translatorsโ€™ Note in the Chinese translation. The claim of the Heartland Institute about CASโ€™ endorsement of its report is completely false.

In fact, the translation was โ€œpurely non-official academic activities [of] the group of translatorsโ€ and โ€œthey do not represent, nor they have ever claimed to represent, CAS or any of CAS institutes.โ€ Perhaps Heartland had made an innocent mistake?ย ย Nope.

The above fact was made very clear in the Translatorsโ€™ Note in the book, and was known to the NIPCC report authors and the Heartland Institute before the translation started. The false claim by the Heartland Institute was made public without any knowledge of the translator group. Since there is absolutely no ground for the so called CAS endorsement of the report, and the actions by the Heartland Institute went way beyond acceptable academic integrity, we have requested by email to the president of the Heartland Institute that the false news on its website to be removed.

We also requested that the Institute issue a public apology to CAS for the misleading statement on the CAS endorsement. If the Heartland Institute does not withdraw its false news or refuse to apologize, all the consequences and liabilities should be borne by the Heartland Institute. We reserve the right for further actions to protect the rights of CAS and the translators group.

Just in case anyone was in any doubt, the overarching Chinese Academy of Sciences also issued a statement urging the public to ignore Heartlandโ€™s โ€œmisleading informationโ€. Heartland promptly threw its previous bravado-soaked statements down the memory hole, deleting all pages. In the intervening days, Bast no longer seems to think this to be a โ€œhistoric momentโ€. Cue embarrassing climb down.

Some people interpreted our news release and a blog post describing this event as implying that the Chinese Academy of Sciences endorses the views contained in the original books. This is not the case, and we apologize to those who may have been confused by these news reports. To be clear, the release of this new publication does not imply CAS and any of its affiliates involved with its production ‘endorse’ the skeptical views contained in the report. Rather, as stated in the translator’s preface of the book, ‘The work of these translators, organizations and funders has been in the translation and the promotion of scientific dialogue, does not reflect that they agree with the views of NIPCC.

Itโ€™s worth bearing in mind that less than a week after Heartland had tried to tell followers that China was doubting the risks of human caused climate change, the country launched the first of seven emissions trading schemes.

Perhaps a better way to describe The Heartland Institute might be โ€œThe Keystone Cops of the climate science denial movementโ€ but theyโ€™ll probably just stick with the line from Theย Economist.

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