Note: This post has been amended to take into account statements made by Heartland and the Charles G Koch Foundation.
IN the last 48 hours a number of documents from the US think-tank the Heartland Institute have been published on the intertubes.
The Heartland Institute, based in Chicago, is well known for publishing opinions and reports which aim to question the validity of mainstream climate science.
The nine documents outline funding plans, suggest an anonymous donor has provided $8.6 million in recent years for climate work, detail a plan to write a climate curriculum for schools from kindergarten to grade 12 and detail payments to scientists, including an Australian academic.
Heartland claims the documents “appear to have been stolen” and that their president Joseph Bast has not yet had a chance to read them “to see if they have been altered”.
Heartland also claims that one of the documents, a “confidential memo” outlining their climate strategy, “is a total fake”. This document was the only one of the nine which was obviously a scanned copy.
For background here, as a free-market think-tank, Heartland would ultimately like to see little to no legislation limiting greenhouse gases. This is their ideological position.
The Australian academic in question is Professor Bob Carter, an adjunct (unpaid) research fellow at James Cook University and a long-time denier of the risks of human-caused climate change.
Professor Carter has also been a speaker at six of Heartland’s climate change conferences. The documents show Professor Carter will receive $1667 per month from Heartland in 2012 to work on a project called the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.
I asked Professor Carter if he was aware of the leak. He claimed he wasn’t, but then told me. Continue reading “Bob Carter responds to Heartland leak”