jtotheizzoe:

Valentine’s Day Climate Denial Bombshell

In documents leaked yesterday, The Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded at various times by the Koch family, ExxonMobil and and R.J. Reynolds, detailed plans to create a K-12 curriculum designed to dissuade teachers from teaching science in order to support climate change denial.

A key passage:

We are pursuing a proposal…to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools…[this] effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.

A coal industry consultant named David Wojick (who has a Ph.D. in something called “Philosophy of Science”) was to be paid $100,000 to design these classroom materials. Heartland also targeted publications like Forbes as new mouthpieces, since

“Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as [Peter] Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.”

The documents were released by an anonymous leak, and have thus far been verified by budget comparisons, tax documents and metadata in the documents that were released. Ironically, Heartland was one of the cheerleaders for the manufactured email-leak controversy known as “ClimateGate” in 2009-2010.

This is some of the most damning proof I’ve ever seen of the depth of organization, money and conspiracy that goes into today’s science denialism movement. 

Rundown of good coverage:

• DeSmogBlog has released the full documents and has more background
• Bad Astronomy for comparisons with ClimateGate
• Shawn Otto details the denialist machine at HuffPo Science
• Chris Mooney at Science Progress’ Intersection blog

If you identify as a feminist and/or an activist, you should know how much this matters to you.