The Heartland Institute, a radical conservative “think tank” backed by big corporations, has been pushing back against worldwide climate research for years. Emboldened by the dawn of a new Trump climate-denying era, they are taking things to the next level by sending a book to the 200,000 K-12 science teachers in U.S. public schools with misleading and confusing information about climate change. PBS Frontline has more on the book and reaction to it:
The Heartland initiative dismisses multiple studies showing scientists are in near unanimous agreement that humans are changing the climate. Even if human activity is contributing to climate change, the book argues, it “would probably not be harmful, because many areas of the world would benefit from or adjust to climate change.”
The campaign elicited immediate derision from the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a nonprofit in Oakland, California that monitors climate change education in classrooms.
“It’s not science, but it’s dressed up to look like science,” said NCSE executive director Ann Reid. “It’s clearly intended to confuse teachers.”
As Angela Fritz of the Washington Post notes, news of the Heartland Institute’s propaganda campaign is particularly relevant:
On Wednesday the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology (let’s just agree call it the House Science committee) held a hearing on climate change. They invited three people who reject the overwhelmingly accepted science of climate change and one active climate science researcher (you can probably imagine how it went).
Why does this matter? If it can be proved the science isn’t settled, regulations on carbon dioxide will be very difficult to implement. Fossil fuel industry will be able to continue as they have been for the past century.
If it turns out the science is good (99 percent of climate scientists agree about that) it means fossil fuels are changing our climate, and if it’s a bad change, then we should probably do something about it. The Heartland Institute covers itself on this one, saying that even if the science is settled, climate change “would probably not be harmful.”
The author this propaganda is Craig D. Idso, Ph.D (geography). Mother Jones describes the Idso family as the von Trapp family of climate change denial:
In 1980, paterfamilias Sherwood Idso, a self-described "bio-climatologist," published a paper in Science concluding that doubling the world's carbon dioxide concentration wouldn't change the planet's temperature all that much. In years that followed, Idso and his colleagues at Arizona State University's Office of Climatology received more than $1 million in research funding from oil, coal, and utility interests. In 1990, he coauthored a paper funded by a coal mining company, titled "Greenhouse Cooling."
They kept the climate change denying in the family:
In 1998, Idso's son Craig founded the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change and began publishing CO2 Science, an online digest of climate change skepticism. He subsequently earned his PhD in geography from ASU under the tutelage of climate skeptic Robert Balling, then the director of its climatology program. In the early 2000s, Idso was director of environmental science at Peabody Energy, the world's largest privately owned coal company. After Peabody laid him off, he began aggressively fundraising for the center, whose budget increased from just north of $30,000 in 2004 to more than $1 million last year. Since 2006, the center has mounted a spirited defense of carbon dioxide using everything from ancient tree-ring data to elementary-school science experiments. "[S]cience tells us that putting more CO2 in the air would actually be good for the planet," its website says. "Therefore, in invoking the precautionary principle one last time, our advice to policy makers who may be tempted to embrace Kyoto-type programs is simply this: Don't mess with success!"
If you are a public school teacher who receives this garbage propaganda in the mail, skim through it and then do what any good scientist would to—put it in the recycle bin and get back to actual science.