Some notes on the Heartland Leak (2012-02-15). Anthony Watts urges us, as others have noted, to ‘pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!’ The revelation that he co-ordinates with and has received money from the Heartland Institute does not mean that he’s just an unscrupulous mouthpiece. He’s definitely not panicked by the exposure either.

James Hansen! Algore! The e-mails were stolen! Some of them are fake!

Anthony’s just collateral damage here though. The real story here is that the notoriously partisan Heartland Institute, a “free-market think tank” theoretically ‘providing information to inform policy debate’ but long regarded as the political home of climate denial, tobacco enthusiasm and government hating, has suffered an embarrassing “leak” of documents. Nothing like a little sunshine to make the bugs skitter.

Read about it at:

• Desmog – Heartland Insider Exposes Institute’s Budget and Strategy
• Deep Climate – Heartland Institute budget and strategy revealed
• Skeptical Science – Denialgate – Internal Heartland Documents Expose Climate Denial Funding Network
• Planet 3.0 – Is Turnabout Fair Play?
• The Guardian – Leaked Heartland Institute documents pull back curtain on climate scepticism
• even Ars Technica – Leaked docs: Heartland Institute think tank pays climate contrarians very well
• Lucia’s The Blackboard (Tell me what’s horrible about this) and Andrew Montford’s Bishop Hill (Heartland docs leaked) have a predictably minimizing take. Nothing to see here!

Of course this is totally different from the “Climategate” e-mails, which revealed that in private conversation some climate scientists didn’t hold high opinions of global warming deniers. The fact that the Heartland Institute spends most of its time and money scheming to confuse the public and to undermine objective scientific advice (i.e. funding Anthony Watts) is an irrelevance in comparison! Thus ending Global Warming forever.

Anthony’s personal defense boils down to noting that the Heartland Institute and an “Anonymous Donor” have (to our knowledge) only given him $44,000 for one particular project. Dr. James Hansen has received way more dough, therefore Anthony is less of a hypocrite. Now that’s what I call claiming the high ground.

However, Anthony’s concealed “scientific” funding came from a biased political organization. That’s a tough one to skate away from, huh?

Note to Anthony: you just look stupid when you try to contrast all money spent in support of any environmental cause to just the political funding for opposition to CO2 regulation. Unless of course the Heartland Institute and their ilk are also busy arguing on behalf of, for example, killing more endangered species or putting more mercury in fish.

2012-02-20 update: Peter Gleick, at the Huffington Post, is the source of the Heartland Institute leak and asserts their authenticity.

2012-05-22 update: After much caterwauling by the Heartland Institute about forgeries and the shameful behavior of nasty warmists, the true conclusion can be drawn: “Peter Gleick cleared of forging documents in Heartland expose“