The Heartland Institute is Fighting Mad

By Alan Caruba

It’s a pleasant fiction that think tanks are places where scholars spend time in dusty libraries. They are places of great intellectual ferment, but one hardly thinks of them of places were battles rage with infiltrators and propagandists, but The Heartland Institute, a 28-year-old national non-profit organization, is doing that right now.

Having been victimized by a leading advocate of global warming and other environmental inventions, Dr. Peter H. Gleick, who misrepresented himself as a member of its board in order to secure confidential information about Heartland’s donors and then took it a step further by creating a phony “memo” misrepresenting its mission has led Heartland to consider legal proceedings against him.

On April 1, I wrote about “Fakegate”, the name Heartland has applied to L’Affair Gleick.

“One leading voice among the global warming advocates was Dr. Peter H. Gleick whose work in the field of hydroclimatology catapulted him into the top ranks of the scientific community. In 2003 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and in 2006 he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2011 he led a new task force on “scientific ethics and integrity” for the American Geophysical Union.


On February 16, 2012 he resigned from the task force citing “personal, private reasons” but the reasons would become very public. On February 20, 2012, Dr. Gleick admitted to having fraudulently obtained documents of a board meeting of The Heartland Institute “under someone else’s name” for the purpose of making known its donors.


Dr. Gleick had also allegedly forged a two-page “strategy memo” purporting that the Institute was engaged in a variety of efforts to fraudulently undermine the claims of global warming scientists. The Institute did not have to, nor ever did engage, in any such efforts. The truth about the global warming claims was sufficient to undermine them.”

One might think the exposure of Dr. Gleick’s effort to slander Heartland would end there, but Heartland understands that it has taken decades of effort to undo the damage done by the global warming hoax and the necessity to take off the gloves in combating the fascist tactics of environmentalists.

Earlier this month, when Oxford University offered Dr. Gleick a prestigious platform to lecture on April 24—despite his confession of improper, unethical and illegal behavior. Heartland called on Oxford to deny him this honor. Oxford declined.

The environmental propaganda machine has been in full throes to “spin” Dr. Gleick’s misdeeds and, most recently, when a group called Forecast the Facts engaged in the tactics of misdirection and deception so common to the Left, Heartland fought back.

As Anthony Watts, a meteorologist and editor of Watts Up With That, noted on April 16th “The Center for American Progress aka Think Progress, a front organization for all things left and ‘progressive’…let it slip (whether by design or accident we don’t know) that they are behind this ‘Forecast the Facts’ outfit.” The Center has a $30 million+ annual budget.

“We always wondered,” said Watts, “who was funding (a) “hate campaign against a local television meteorologist” they deemed a “denier” of the global warming hoax.” Typically, Forecast the Facts attributed perfectly natural weather events, tornadoes, to global warming or climate change. They claimed that the states affected were “dominated by anti-government, anti-science ideologues.”

Heartland has identified Forecast the Facts as “a front group created by the same individuals responsible for politicizing the science and polarizing the debate over climate change”, noting further that the group “has no scientists on staff, no history of participating in the climate change debate, and no credibility.”

“Forecast the Facts is promoting the results of a petition that is fraudulent, based on false claims contained in a forged memo. It is grossly misrepresenting The Heartland Institute’s position on climate change.”

With elegant irony, one of the earliest advocates of global warming, James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia (Earth Goddess) hypothesis, has just come forth to admit he was completely wrong and that he and others who spread fear and panic over global warming were alarmists. In his words, "The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books - mine included - because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened,"

On May 21-23, Heartland will sponsor the Seventh International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago. As had previous conferences, it will field an impressive group of scientists and others who have braved the kind of slander heaped on Heartland by Green organizations and groups whose purpose is to mislead the public regarding the science of climate change.

It is refreshing to see how Heartland has declared war on those who have sought to damage its reputation and to deter donors from supporting it, and is fighting back in a vigorous fashion.

© Alan Caruba, 2011