Heartland Doesn't Like It's Own Medicine

Update 2/21: It turns out that Peter Gleick, founder and president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, obtained Heartland’s private documents and forwarded them to leading journalists that report on issues related to climate change. 

He explains the situation in his statement published on The Huffington Post.

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After being exposed for the climate change misinformation machine that it is, the Heartland Institute has sent legal notices to numerous websites and blogs, threatening them if they don’t remove the "stolen and forged documents" and what it views as "malicious and false commentary" based on them.

Maybe we’ll be on their list for our story, Koch-Funded
Heartland Institute Developing Anti-Global Warming Curriculum for Elementary Schools, which exposes their secret plans to pay people to misinform the nation’s children and also divulges some of its anonymous donors.

Heartland should take their medicine. Remember ClimateGate? Heartland STOLE emails exchanged between climate scientists and then took them out of context and led the world to believe their research findings were a scam. That derailed the Copenhagen climate change summit – when the world was the closest its been to passing a treaty.

"We know what it feels like to have private information stolen and posted online via illegal hacking," say climate scientists in a letter posted by The Guardian. "It happened to climate researchers in 2009 and again in 2011."

"Personal emails were culled through and taken out of context. In 2009, the Heartland Institute was among the groups that spread false allegations about what these stolen emails said.

Despite multiple independent investigations, which demonstrated that allegations against scientists were false, the Heartland Institute continued to attack scientists based on the stolen emails."

"We hope the Heartland Institute will heed its own advice to "think about what has happened" and recognize how its attacks on science and scientists have helped poison the debate over climate change policy."

The Guardian also reports that John Mashey, a retired computer scientist and Silicon Valley executive, filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service to revoke Heartland’s 501(c)(3)
tax-exempt status because its public relations and lobbying efforts violate that status.

An online petition criticizes General Motors for taking a taxpayer bailout and using some of that money to fund the Heartland Institute’s climate misinformation campaign.

Because of groups like Heartland, the world is currently on the path for the worst consequences of climate change. The chief conomist of the International Energy Agency (IEA) recently said, "The world is perfectly on track to 11 degrees Fahrenheit increase in temperature.

• We face unprecedented tornadoes like the one
  that ripped away much of Joplin, Missouri in May 2011.
• Parts of our Southwest (and Mexico) are now dryer than the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, with irregular snow pack in the Rockies disrupting water supplies and reducing crop yields.
• Drought-induced insect infestations are destroying forests across the western states and mega-wildfires are increasing
  on every continent except Antarctica.
• Record floods disrupted the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys during 2011, not to mention Biblical floods in
  Australia, India and Pakistan where tens of millions of people were displaced.

4 of 5 Americans live in counties affected by federally declared weather-related disasters since 2006. 

And this is the early stage – "We ain’t seen nothing yet." Thanks, Heartland!

Read the full letter from the climate scientists: