Make Nexus Hot News part of your morning: click here to subscribe.January 14, 2022
🦖 Heartland Institute Sending 100,000 Climate Disinfo Pamphlets To Teachers Because They Didn’t Learn Last Time That Everyone Knows They’re Stupid Having failed to get any real traction for their “Climate at a Glance” website, the disgraced and debunked Heartland Institute recently emailed subscribers to let us know they’d be sending 100,000 printed versions of the website directly to professors and teachers around the U.S.
This is hardly the first time deniers have tried to simply mail their way into classrooms. Exposed plans going back to 2012, reprised in 2017, were loudly and prominently criticized for their plans to send 200,000 copies of their IPCC-disinfo books to teachers.
Apparently they’re aiming lower this year with a target half the size, but in keeping with the most cutting-edge technology, they also included a QR code in the email that would send people to the .pdf of aggregated web posts. You know, just in case anyone wanted to take a picture of a QR code to get a link to a PDF to see all the exact same content that’s on their “ClimateAtAGlance.com” website all at once, without navigation. Apparently they felt that process would be easier for their readers to pass along to friends than just the link to the website. (Heartland definitely gets technology and is in no way a struggling 20th-century relic.)
As for the content itself, it might actually be somewhat closer to reality than you might expect, but only in that even Heartland has to pretend to accept the findings of official reports, and the email notes that their content references “mainstream sources such as NOAA, WHO, EPA, and others like them.”
It is true that they reference those sources, in that they misrepresent, cherry pick, and cite out-of-date-reports. Of course, they also cite a bevy of notably less mainstream sources, like the “climate at a glance” co-author, Heartland fellow, and college drop-out Anthony Watts’ blog. WUWT gets at least a dozen citations, Watts himself made ten of the graphs, Heartland gives at least a dozen citations to itself and its own reports, and even Sandy Hook denier/Birther/conspiracy theorist
Tony Heller gets a graph and reference despite the fact that Anthony Watts long banned Heller from WUWT for his “inability to openly admit to and correct mistakes”.
Also cited is a Spencer and Braswell paper so egregiously bad that the Editor in Chief of the journal that published it resigned in disgrace after its publication. (Surely it was in the interest of open access that the reference goes directly to a .pdf of the study on
Roy Spencer’s website, and not the actual URL for the study from the publishing journal, that just so happens to include a bright yellow header pointing readers to the resignation letter…)
Unsurprisingly, then, the
Heartland "Climate at a Glance" chapters are a
grab bag of cherry-picking the most cautious or out-of-date statements from IPCC reports, and repetition of long-debunked denial. For example, reading the Urban Heat Island and Temperatures sections, one would never guess that
🦕 Watts was part of a research team that took this contention seriously, did the research, and
found Watts and deniers were wrong. (
🐍 Watts then recanted and refused to honor his pledge to accept the study findings.)
For another example of how these work, the Heartland’s “glance” at wildfires is based entirely on data that is well known to be of poor quality, and has since been removed from the National Interagency Fire Center website all together because early wildfires were double or even triple-counted by overlapping federal agencies, among other issues with data quality. (And Heartland knows that this data is flawed, because factcheckers debunked it and Heartland didn’t care.)
So if you’re a teacher who wants science-ish info from an organization that is
still running pro-tobacco propaganda 😠, the
most long-recognized and dangerous fields of industrial disinformation, then
Heartland’s a good choice for your students.
But be forewarned, they’re called “Climate at a Glance” because if you look at them any closer than at a glance, even elementary school students will be able to see through the thinly sourced material.