Climate scientist’s theft of Heartland document backfires
For believers in a science that supposedly is “settled,” global-warming advocates are awfully concerned about the need to silence dissent. Last week, the ethics chairman for the American
Geophysical Union resigned in disgrace over his role in a black-bag job meant to intimidate the Heartland Institute, one of the most effective voices questioning the anti-carbon-dioxide orthodoxy.
On Monday, climate scientist
Peter H. Gleick confessed that he stole the identity of a Heartland staffer in order to obtain confidential financial files detailing the private group’s finances.
Mr. Gleick then spread those papers around to various global-warming blogs, intending to discredit the group’s work as if it were bought and paid for by big oil companies.
That particular line of attack is especially pathetic. According to Heartland’s publicly available
Internal Revenue Service filings, its budget is about $6 million. The institute works on education, health care, telecommunication and other issues, with only about a quarter of its funds devoted to the environment. Let’s compare that to the other side. According to the
Government Accountability Office, U.S. taxpayers forked over $26.1 billion to bankroll climate-change programs in President
Obama’s stimulus bill alone. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The
European Union also spent $9.5 billion on climate-change financing, and the United Nations chips in as well.