Illinois Review Promotes Junk Science on Global Warming

This post on Illinois Review drew my attention today: “Do nothing,” global warming skeptics say.

The blurb is is related to the the U.N. Climate Change Conference going on in Bali, Indonesia this week and the Chicago-based Heartland Institute’s attempts to nose its way into the news surrounding the conference by claiming that the U.N. is trying to silence it’s panel of “dissenting scientists”.

The Heartland Institute is a self-described “nonprofit research and education organization”. Its mission, according to the website is to “discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. Such solutions include parental choice in education, choice and personal responsibility in health care, market-based approaches to environmental protection, privatization of public services, and deregulation in areas where property rights and markets do a better job than government bureaucracies”. Based on that alone, we know that it is not a scientific organization. This is a marketing/lobbying organization.

According to Sourcewatch, its funding sources include Exxon (over $790,000), Scaife Foundations (Richard Mellon Scaife is the guy who funded a lot of the effort to impeach Bill Clinton using fabricated charges), John M. Olin Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation (Wal-Mart fortune), the tobacco industry, and others. So it is funded by a bunch of very rich conservatives and two of the major industries that would like to see government regulation go away.

To lend further incredibility, IR refers to Drudge having picked up the story and also refers to the press blog of James Inhofe, Oklahoma’s wacky Bible-thumping, climate-change-denying Senator whose top sources of campaign contributions include the oil and gas and electric utilities industries.

I just don’t get why these Republican chowderheads continue to promote this crap science. They have to live in this world too. There may a short-term payoff for their intellectual dishonesty but it is beginning to look very short-term. This is just one more reason why we need to get us a new Representative. Roskam votes with this crowd. And he’s received some money from Exxon too.

There’s another interesting tidbit about Heartland Institute here.