Heartland Institute's Complete Hypocrisy (Look at How It Responded to "Climategate")

 
Climategate was a crime. Why? Because:

  1. someone hacked into computers and private emails;
  2. the hacked info was used to frame climate scientists by pulling and publishing quotes out of context and making the climate scientists look like they were saying something they weren’t and doing something wrong (over half a dozen independent investigations have found data were NOT manipulated and the science is as sound as ever).

Someone also committed a crime this year, as we found out this week on Valentine’s Day, by pretending to be a Heartland Institute board member in order to get board documents emailed to him or her and then sharing those with the public.

However, it’s pretty odd to see how the Heartland Institute framed the latter incident compared to how it framed the former (one which had much more severe consequences).

heartland institute hypocrite

“Climategate”

Note that after at least 7 independent investigations, the conclusion is that about 15 years worth of emails show climate scientists have not fiddled with the data and been conducting junk science. Rather, after thorough and serious review, it’s clear that their work is as sound as ever, global warming and climate change are as big a threat as ever, and all the claims of manipulated data or bad science are completely false.

But long after these conclusions have been made, what is the Heartland Institute saying? Here’s a quote from its blog in November: “[climate scientists] who have now been exposed by Climategate of rigging data, hiding declines, and blacklisting peers who don’t toe the line of catastrophic orthodoxy.”

Um, what?! Exposed by who? No independent evaluation of the emails by scientific bodies have found or concluded any of this. Is the Heartland Institute so out of touch with reality?

Heartland Leak

Now, let’s see what the institute has to say about the recent leak:

The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents.

Hmm, the Heartland Institute did not wait in the case of “Climategate” and even once over half a dozen independent reviews were conducted, it continued (and continues) to misrepresent the emails of these climate scientists, misrepresent the science, and misrepresent the findings of independent evaluations by scientific institutions.

Going on:

[H]onest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.

Umm, are you kidding me? Three years of nonsense and praise for “Climategate” combined with the continual misrepresentation of what it actually was, and now the Heartland Institute wants to call in the referees and have us all sit peacefully in a thoughtful moment on how wrong it is to steal information and misrepresent people? You have to be kidding me!

Truthfully, the hypocrisy goes on and on, but I think I’ve had enough of it for today… on to something a little more enjoyable and uplifting!

Hypocrite image via shutterstock

4 thoughts on “Heartland Institute's Complete Hypocrisy (Look at How It Responded to "Climategate")”

  1. I’m neutral on this but was eager to see some juicy emails but that is the difference in climategate and fakegate, there really is nothing but a release of some anonymous donor info which may hurt corporations and future Heartland stuff, and a little bit of money to Watts to put up a free public website to bring NOAA data to the public, something which would also be neutral (just data) so I don’t see much although I wanted to!!! Like what goes around comes around, but also the means they got it was specifically shady where somebody lied and said they were somebody else, while the climategate means are still totally unknown.

    1. It seems you haven’t looked closely enough at either story:

      In the stealing of climate scientists emails, those out-of-context quotes that excited you so much were used to completely misrepresent the scientists. Yes, they were juicier, because they were picked out from 15 or so years of emails and rearranged to look like it. The scientists were completely misrepresented and still are today, even though over half a dozen independent evaluations have cleared things up.

      In this story, no one is being misrepresented. Even if the “Climate memo” turns out to be fake, everything in it has basically been confirmed by now elsewhere. Teaching kids that the science is highly debated when there is actually a scientific consensus on the matter is completely screwed up and much more despicable than anything revealed in climate scientists’ emails. It’s astonishing — these people are going to lie to our kids about one of the most important matters in the history of the human race!

      Climategate was a hack, and it was illegal. Just as we don’t know who did that, we don’t know who committed the most recent crime. How either of them went about it does not make much difference, in my opinion — both were dishonest means of acquiring information not rightfully theirs. However, in the case of the Heartland leak, quotes and information are not being presented out of context or in a way as to frame anyone for doing or saying something they did not.

      To check out some of the revealing information in the document, though, check out these posts (& the first, oldest chronologically, has been updated to include many stories not here): http://planetsave.com/tag/heartland/

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