A few weeks ago we reported that teachers are shying away from the subject of climate change in high school. Science teachers have received so much pushback on evolution vs. creation that they’re reluctant to invite more controversy.
They’ll be even more reluctant after they receive the school curriculum under development by the Koch-funded Heartland Institute’s climate change disinformation machine.
Other corporate funders of right-wing think tank Heartland Institute include some surprising names like Microsoft and others that are less surprising – General Motors and GlaxoSmithKline, according to internal documents obtained by climate denial watchdog, DeSmogBlog. Heartland plans to get new funders from the natural gas fracking industry this year.
Other funders include: Altria (parent company of Philip Morris) Bayer, Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Time Warner.
ThinkProgress also got its hands on internal documents that reveal the Heartland Institute plans to develop "global warming curriculum" for elementary schools that presents climate science as "a major scientific controversy."
Among its teachings: "warmer is better, doesn’t cause harm," and "it’s natural, not man-made anyway"; "computer models are flawed and there’s no scientific consensus."
In other words – Complete Lies and Misinformation.
Dr. David Wojick, a coal-industry consultant, is developing the curriculum for $100,000 a year. Wojick is not a climate scientist – his doctorate is in epistomology.
ThinkProgress provides this quote:
"Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective," Heartland’s confidential 2012 fundraising document bemoans. The group believes that Wojick’s project has "potential for great success," because he has "contacts at virtually all the national organizations involved in producing, certifying, and promoting scientific curricula." The document explains that Wojick will produce "modules" that promote the conspiratorial claim that climate change is "controversial."
His curriculum will emphasize that "whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy"; "the reliability of climate models is controversial"; and "whether CO2 is actually a pollutant is controversial".
The Heartland Institute also runs the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, a conspiracy-theorist parody of the Nobel-prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Heartland pays a team of scientists about $300,000 a year to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered."
The Heartland Institute was one of the major mouthpieces behind the debunked ‘Climategate’ email theft.
Read "Climate Scientists Fight Back Against Spam Wall St.Journal Climate Denial Op-Ed":
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You mean Heartland is a right wing advocacy organization?! They take donations?! When did this all happen??
Next Heartland will be creating a curriculum that that states the Law of Gavity is a myth perpetrated by alarmists.