โYOU have an important decision to make,โ wrote Diane Bast from the conservative Heartland Institute in a memo posted to science teachers across the US lastย month.
โWill you tell your students the โscience is settledโ on global warming, as the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims itย is?โ
The Heartland Institute likes to ask disingenuous questions like this. ย Who can forget its disastrous billboard campaign of last year with that picture of terrorist and murderer Ted โUnabomberโย Kaczynski and the wordsย โI still believe in Global Warming. Doย you?โ
Not surprisingly, after hearing of the billboardย key private sponsors and funders of Heartland pulled their support quicker than you can say โWhat on earth were they thinking?โ
The Heartland Institute is a conservative free market โthink tankโ that has made the ideologically-driven denial of climate change science one its core causes. The organisation has accepted millions of dollars from the likes of Exxon, family foundations built on polluting industries and many millions more via a slush fund financed by anonymous conservative millionaires.
Diane Bast, the wife of Heartland president Joseph Bast, was writing to the science teachers to introduce the free copies of its enclosed Nongovernmental Panel on Climate Change report – Climate Change Reconsidered II.
โLike the IPCC‘s reports, NIPCC‘s reports cite thousands of articles appearing in peer-reviewed science journals relevant to the subject of human-induced climate change,โ wrote Bast, who said the report wasย โcomprehensive, objective, and faithful to the scientificย method.โ
Yet the report is anything but. Australian astrophysicist Dr Michael Brown, of Monash University in Melbourne, described it succinctly as โpartisan pseudoscienceโ. Dr Brown wrote in The Conversation:
Does the NIPCC fairly and robustly assess the science? No. It is all too easy to find โdebunkedโ papers getting a second life in latest NIPCC report.
The NIPCC report, Brown found, had a habit of citing sceptic papers which had managed to find their way into a journal without mentioning the responses to those papers, also published in the peer-reviewed literature. โDead science lives in the NIPCC reports,โ wrote Brown,ย adding:
It is this deliberately partisan, selective, and uncritical approach to evidence that marks the NIPCC report as a work of pseudoscience.
Steve Newton, a Programs and Policy Director at the National Center for Science Education, said he was concerned some teachers – from Kindergarten to Grade 12 – might at first glance be fooled by Heartland’s appeal. Heย wrote:
The danger in the Heartland Institute’s mass mailing is that some K-12 teachers may mistake what they see for real science. K-12 teachers teach a wide range of subjects in which they have variable experience and expertise. As climate science is incorporated into courses, many teachers find themselves looking for information to use in class. And here, delivered right to their mailbox, is Heartland’s report dressed up to look like a real scientific assessment from that groupโฆwhat was the name, again? NIPCC? IPCC? Are they different?
Writing on the NCSE Science League of America blog, Newton said rather than being comprehensive and objective, the NIPCC offers โthe tiniest slice of information possible, cherry-picked factoids out of context and without regard to the overall pictureโ. Newton pointed out the disingenuous nature of Diane Bast’s memo for asking teachers if they would explain to their students that โscience is never settledโ. Newtonย wrote:
To say that science can never come toย anyย conclusions, that we can never reasonably settle any question, is to give up on the entire scientific adventure of understanding the natural world. If we can never know anything, whatโs the point of investigating? This message is profoundly anti-science, and teachers should know that what Heartland and the NIPCC stand for is not some โalternativeโ science, but a private, alternative reality.
But this isn’t Heartland’s first attempt to push its partisan view on educators, teachers and pupils. Internal Heartland documents revealed in 2011 that the organisation wanted to pay a former coal industry consultant David Wojickย to write a โglobal warming curriculumโ for K-12 students which would focus on โcontroversialโ aspects of the science. ย Heartland wrote at theย time:
Heartland has tried to make material available to teachers, but has had only limited success. Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective.
Back when Heartland was putting up billboards of the Unabomber, the organisation’s president Joseph Bast wrote that โOf course, not all global warming alarmists are murderers or tyrantsโ. ย Apparently, Heartland also think some of them might be teachersย too.
The organisation, like other climate science denialists, seems keen to poison classrooms with partisan and politicisedย propaganda.
In April, Heartland bragged it had sent 100,000 copies of a climate science denial book to ย โeducators, business and civic leaders, judges, environmental journalists, and elected officials across the countryโ.ย Heartland also mailed a DVD aimed at school children which argued climate change was mostly caused by the sun and not emissions of greenhouseย gases.
High profile Australian climate science denier, mining director and geologist Professor Ian Plimer has also targeted school children last year with his book โHow To get Expelled From School: A guide to climate change for pupils, parents and puntersโ.
Also in Australia, the conservative Liberal National Party in the coal mining state of Queensland voted at its state convention to ban the teaching of climate change science inย schools.
The proposal was put by a local doctor and party member who had also claimed to have possibly disproven the greenhouse theory in an experiment at his home using only two styrofoam boxes, a roll of plastic Glad Wrap and some bicarbonate of soda.
As far as I know, these revelations didn’t end up in the NIPCC report. Perhaps they just missedย it.
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