The climate denial think tank Heartland Institute created a poster of 58 “experts” who reject the 97% consensus on climate change science. To set the record straight, DeSmogBlog has remixed the poster with more accurate bios of the 58 “experts” so the public can judge whether to believe the fossil-fuel-funded Heartland Institute or the overwhelming scientific consensus.

Global Warming Scientific Consensus

In the last few decades, the climate science community has pieced together an ever clearer picture of the effect of the accumulation of CO₂ in the atmosphere. A scientific consensus emerged that Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are warming up, that it is predominantly due to human activities, and that continued warming will lead to severe consequences to humans and large parts of the biosphere.

The warming of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans.(Source: Skeptical Science 2012)

Work done by James Powell in 2012 illustrates this point. He reviewed the literature of peer-reviewed climate articles from 1991 to 2012, identifying 13,950 articles concerned with global warming. Of these, only 24 papers were found to reject global warming. Furthermore, these papers were authored by a small group of people, and had very low impact on other authors. If noticed, they were found to be flawed in one way or the other. In 2013, Powell added two more articles to this short list. One is by Russian physicist S.V. Avakyan, who, writing for the “Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences”, also noted in his article that “The switch of world powers […] to carbon-free energy […] may lead to economic collapse for Russia as a consequence of the reduction […] to sell oil and natural gas on the world market.” The other, by German chemist Heinz Hug, which appeared in the journal “Nachrichten aus der Chemie”, might not even be peer-reviewed, and attributes global warming to cosmic radiation, a claim that has long been debunked.

Additionally, a Skeptical Science survey led by Cook et al. (2013) came to the conclusion that there is a 97% consensus among climate science experts that humans are causing global warming.

Efforts to undermine climate action have been going on for decades, too. For example, the Western Fuels Association conducted a half-million dollar campaign in 1991 designed to ‘reposition global warming as theory (not fact).’

Two interests (often combined) have been dominant: industries that feel threatened by the switch to renewable energy, and free-trade fundamentalists, fearing a slippery slope into total governmental control of the economy. ExxonMobil was for a while the dominant spender on disinformation campaigns. In recent years they have been replaced and topped by other entities. One is Koch Industries, which funded groups denying climate change with more than US$67,000,000 since 1997. Another very important one is DonorsTrust, also named “the dark-money ATM of the Conservative Movement”. It collects funds from donors, and redistributes those funds to organizations promoting a right-wing agenda. DonorsTrust ensures that these donations cannot be traced back to their origins. Between 2002 and 2010, they provided over $90,000,000 in funding to 84 groups that deny the scientific realities of climate change.

The science of climate change has been robust for a while now. Thus, the most effective way to fool the public has been to parade fake experts in front of them, reasonably assuming that a layperson will not be able to see the difference. This has been greatly aided by the willingness of parts of the media to provide a false balance in talk shows, reports and print.

During the last decade, the Heartland Institute has established itself at the forefront of climate denial. They already worked with tobacco company Philip Morris in the 1990s, “questioning” the science linking second-hand smoke to health risks. Since 2012, they do not disclose their sources of funding, but received at least US$10,815,644 from DonorsTrust and its partner organization Donors Capital Fund.

Since 2008, the Heartland Institute has been hosting nine “International Climate Change Conferences” (aka “Denial-a-Palooza”), where like-minded visitors can “collect the rhetorical baseball bats with which they will club environmentalists and climate scientists in the weeks and months to come”.

In 2012, Heartland Institute received backlash and withdrawal of funds resulting from a billboard campaign using Unabomber Ted Kaczynski to equate those not believing in a vast climate conspiracy with “murderers, tyrants, and madmen.”

During the run-up to the 2014 COP20 conference in Lima, the Heartland Institute published a poster (left) presenting “58 experts [that] don’t believe global warming is a crisis.” This was used by Republican Chairman of the Senate Environment Committee (…) James Inhofe in his most recent “Man-Made Global Warming is a Hoax!” speech on the Senate floor. DeSmogBlog took up the effort to check their credentials, to let you decide for yourself if you would choose to believe them, instead of the climate science community. Click on the right picture to see the new, improved version.

Below is a list of all 58 Heartland “experts”, listing their affiliations, and providing links to sources and rebuttals.

Peer-reviewed data are mostly estimates from 2011. If you find any inaccuracies, please report them, and we will correct them as soon as possible.