Heartland leak: much more than just a memo
Libertarian thinktank the Heartland Institute released a statement yesterday confirming internal documents apparently written by the institute’s president for a board meeting were leaked after a staff member emailed them to an anonymous third party.
Heartland claims one of the documents leaked to DeSmogBlog – a two page memo outlining a ‘2012 Heartland Climate Strategy’ – is a fake, intended to “defame and discredit” the thinktank. However, the other papers, which Heartland has still not disowned or come out to verify, replicate almost all of the points contained in the document and appear to reveal many further details about the institute’s climate strategy.
There are five key differences between the 2012 memo and the rest of the papers.
First, we reported that according to the memo a global warming curriculum for school students which Heartland plan to pay US Department of Energy consultant David Wojick to produce is designed to “dissuade teachers from teaching science”.
That description doesn’t appear in the other materials . Instead, the funding strategy document suggests Wojick is creating modules that can slot easily into school science lessons, with the aim of reversing the “limited success” Heartland has had in getting teachers to use its materials so far. The idea appears to be for the curriculum to emphasise controversy about climate science, rather than to discourage teaching it altogether:
“Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on “modules” for grades 10-12 on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy”), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”).
Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact (“environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather”), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.”
Second, the memo Heartland says is a fake states that the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change – a group of scientists that receive $300,000 a year from Heartland – publishes ‘Climate Change Reconsidered’, a set of reports designed to “undermine” the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s work.
In contrast, the fundraising plan says Climate Change Reconsidered is “the most comprehensive and authoritative rebuttal to the United Nations’ IPCC reports” – “rebut” rather than “undermine”.
The description of the NIPCC in the fundraising plan still differs markedly from the mission statement on the NIPCC website:
“[A]n international panel of nongovernment scientists and scholars who have come together to understand the causes and consequences of climate change â?¦ NIPCC was created to provide an independent “second opinion” on the topics addressed by the initial drafts of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report.”
Third, the memo Heartland has disowned states climate skeptic blogger Anthony Watts is being paid $90,000 to set up a website. The other documents also note this project, suggesting that the website will interpret data from the US “National Aeronautics and Atmospheric Administration’s[sic]” improved temperature stations. According to the fundraising plan, Heartland’s Anonymous Donor is providing $44,000 towards the project, and the institute is going to help Watts raise a further $44,000 – a total of $88,000, slightly less than is suggested in the memo.
Fourth, only the memo mentions a strategy to recruit more “neutral voices”, or a desire to keep voices that agree with the scientific consensus on climate out of traditionally skeptic-friendly media outlets such as Forbes.
Finally, the memo says the Koch Foundation donated $200,000 to Heartland in 2011, when according to the fundraising plan, the Koch brothers paid $25,000 in 2011 and are projected to increase this by $200,000 this year.
We’ve retracted the quotes we originally took from the document Heartland have said is a fake. Anthony Watts has analysed the differences between the memo and the other documents, noting that most of the documents were prepared by Joe Bast, Heartland’s president, while the metadata for the memo has been erased. Watts suggests that the rest of the papers look “bland” without the framing memo, but we disagree.
The other documents – as yet unverified, but not rejected by Heartland – give a detailed picture of Heartland’s network – the people it pays and the projects they undertake with the institute’s help. Leo Hickman provides a rundown in the Guardian today.
According to Heartland, the leak happened when an unknown person “fraudulently assumed the identity of a Heartland board member and persuaded a staff member […] to ‘re-send’ board materials to a new email address”.
Heartland maintains the “authenticity of [the other documents] has not been confirmed as it “still has not had the opportunity” to check whether the others have been altered. It has asked everyone who has reported on the leak to take down the documents and any quotes, and publish retractions or risk prosecution.
The institute has not denied any of the traceable information, and much of it has been confirmed by other sources. For example, Watts has confirmed he is receiving funding from Heartland for his NOAA project, while a Heartland senior fellow told Think Progress that the institute is indeed funding Wojick’s alternative climate curriculum. Meanwhile, Businessgreen carries comments from Microsoft, Diageo and GlaxoSmithKline confirming they made donations (of software rather than money in Microsoft’s case) to Heartland – although all three say they oppose the institute’s stance on climate.
Heartland may be trying to distract attention by focusing on the memo. But even without it, the rest of the documents and the corroborating facts indicate a compelling story about Heartland’s tactics and the people who have chosen to associate with the institute.