Dave Appell at the Quark Soup blog has uncovered a year-old episode of “Climate Challenge” featuring Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, one of the world’s leading climate alarmist organizations. 350.org created a group called Forecast the Facts in January 2012 to attack TV meteorologists who refuse to toe the alarmist line and scare viewers about catastrophic man-made global warming.
Lately, however, the Forecast the Facts project has focused exclusively on attacking The Heartland Institute — pounding on us with fake indignation and harassing donors exposed by Peter Gleick’s admitted theft of our internal budget and fundraising documents. The irony here, of course, is that McKibben would never dream of revealing his donors because that might open his groups up to the same underhanded tactics. But as this video shows, McKibben says he has no idea who funds his organization, beyond a start-up gift from the Rockefeller Brothers years ago. Even the simpatico interviewer finds that hard to believe.
As Appell writes:
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Several friends of Heartland have expressed trepidation about continuing their long-time associations with us. This is my reply to one of those scholars, which shines a little more light about what’s going on around here since Peter Gleick confessed to creating the “Fakegate” scandal:
Dear John,
Sorry you feel this way.
For 28 years, The Heartland Institute has tried to stay “above the fray,” producing high-quality research and commentary and staying focused on the issues, even as the political dialogue became more and more polarized and corrosive. Almost alone among think tanks, we focus on communicating with people who do not already agree with us. We rely on research and reason, not rhetoric and emotion, and still do.
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Marc Morano of Climate Depot — a proud cosponsor of our Seventh International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago May 21- 23 — shared with us today his observations on the mainstream media’s double standard for tolerating provocative communication strategies when it comes to the climate.
Marc’s views are his own — and, as always with him, an invigorating read. Those who are subject to easily getting the vapors over such things should probably not heed the advice “click to continue” below. For the rest, here is the full-and-raw Marc Morano, who called out — and answered — some egregious examples of global warming alarmists using “provocative communications” about skeptics that the MSM seems to have missed:
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“Green Power Failure” is a May 10, 2012 article by Canadian columnist Lawrence Solomon for Canada’s Financial Post.
The article is a warning for the United States of pitfalls from adopting renewable electricity sources of solar and wind. Quoting Mr. Solomon, ”Global-warming-related catastrophes are increasingly hitting vulnerable populations around the world, with one species in particular danger: the electricity ratepayer. In Canada, in the U.K., in Spain, in Denmark, in Germany and elsewhere the danger to ratepayers is especially great, but ratepayers in one country — the U.S. — seem to have weathered the worst of the disaster.”
Mr. Solomon then addresses situations in the U. K., Germany, Denmark and other countries which have adopted sizable amounts of solar and wind electricity generation that has led to electricity rates so high that 15 percent of households or more are in “fuel poverty”–ten percent or more of household income goes to electricity or gas. Many of these countries pay electricity rates triple the U. S. average.
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This is a brief list of attacks on skeptics of man-made global warming, which despite their vulgarity saw preferential tolerance from the mainstream media.
Know of any others? Email me at tsmith@heartland.org
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Not that we expect the clowns and criminals who run state government in neighboring Illinois to care, but we do hope, for a moment at least, they cast their collective gaze north of the border to Wisconsin.
Something is happening there that Illinois’ governor and most of its legislators no doubt will hardly be able to grasp. Ditto for legislators in California, New York and other fiscally dysfunctional states.
Wisconsin recently has been holding down spending and taxes, and the state has gone from a budget deficit of more than $3 billion to a projected budget surplus.
Imagine! Setting spending priorities and stopping further raids on the pocketbooks of businesses and individuals has achieved what more spending and higher taxes could not.
The Wisconsin-based MacIver Institute has the story, based on the Wisconsin Department of Administration’s latest budget projections.
Russell Cook notes over at The American Thinker how The Heartland Institute’s one-day Unabomber billboard along a highway near Chicago “was a gift to alarmists on a silver platter.”
Noted. It was a mistake on our part. Sorry about that.
Cook gives us our lumps in his American Thinker post. But he also makes some other key points that put what some call the “Climate Wars” into perspective.
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States and school systems around the country have been reformatting cafeteria menus, partly pushed by Michelle Obama’s 2010 “Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act,” which essentially has taxpayers triple-paying for the food schools serve under wild and conflicting nutrition regulations, and partly pushed by a desire to be politically correct. This has led to some outrageous incidents, including the recent North Carolina incident where a teacher forced a child to swap her homemade lunch for the school’s chicken nuggets, a Michigan state child obesity registry and tracking system, and now a new set of rules in Massachusetts that forbid school vending machines, bake sales, door-to-door candy fundraisers, and snacks at after-school events and parties.
The state’s justification is “an obesity epidemic.” And, to be fair, lots of American kids are fat–not pudgy, fat. But does this justify blanketing schools with often conflicting and nonsensical food requirements? Massachusetts State Sen. Susan Fargo thinks so.
“If we didn’t have so many kids that were obese, we could have let things go,” she said. “But this is a major public health problem and these kids deserve a chance at a good, long, healthy life.”
Ah, yes, government. Giver of good, long, healthy lives!
These regulation-happy state officials don’t seem to understand the law of unintended consequences, and this action has several. The problem for them is that some of the unintended consequences pit government regulation against government regulation, with the not-unlikely possibility the public begins to notice the Kafka-esque absurdity of it all.
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Heartland Senior Fellow for Environment Policy James M. Taylor was interviewed for part of a story on PBS Newshour last night about the teaching of climate change in Americas’s public schools. It was biased heavily toward the views of climate alarmists, which was hardly a surprise. But since The Heartland Institute has been gaining attention for our plans to craft climate curriculum, the PBS producers reached out to us for “balance.”
Below are James’ quick thoughts on the piece, and the video of the story. These folks really need to attend Heartland’s Seventh International Conference on Climate Change (and so should you!). The idea that sound climate science backs up the alarmist narrative is a stubborn myth.
Skepticism is essential to science itself. It is deeply disturbing that many public school teachers bemoan such skepticism in their students rather than celebrate such intuitive adherence to scientific principles.
The heart of the alleged global warming crisis is predictions of future warming from computer models that have consistently predicted too much warming in the past. Importantly, scientific data have shown that the two most important assumptions of such computer models – that modest warming due to carbon dioxide will be substantially exacerbated by changes in cloud formation and atmospheric humidity – are not occurring in the real world.
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America’s fixation on diversity is logical. We are a nation of immigrants, a great “melting pot” of ethnicities, nationalities and cultures, brought together by a choice to be an American made by us or our ancestors, and by a shared commitment to a unique set of values that constitute what George Will has called the “catechism” of America’s civil religion.
To acknowledge and appreciate our national diversity is to embrace our American heritage and culture. But diversity itself pales in comparison to the values that all Americans share; we come together as Americans not because we respect everyone’s differences, but because we are commonly invested in a core set of beliefs enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. These ideals transcend diversity.
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