Since 2008, the Heartland Institute has tried, and failed, to make an IPCC knock-off report a thing. And by naming it the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, they hope to trick their audience into believing that it’s similar in scope and credibility to the real thing. Much like the cuckoo will drop its eggs in the nest another bird spent time and resources building, deniers crave the credibility of real science institutions, but time and again they’ve proven they just can’t do the job themselves.
On October 5th of this year, Heartland released a “Summary for Policymakers” for its latest NIPCC project in anticipation of the IPCC 1.5 report. To be honest, dear reader, we didn’t even notice. WUWT ran a verbatim copy-paste of the press release, and a couple days later there was an op-ed by Heartland folks in the American Thinker and one by Heartland’s Paul Driessen in TownHall, but that seems to be the extent of the media strategy. No one unaffiliated with the report has written anything original about it.
This NIPCC report is created and published by a group funded by the fossil fuel industry, and big surprise, it’s about all the different ways that fossil fuels are good and renewables bad. But are the examples valid, intelligent and/or compelling?
We’ll let you be the judge, but we’d like to note that the second of four main points in the press release argues that fossil fuel extraction is better for the environment than renewables because it takes up less surface area. That’s the level of analysis we’re looking at here: “Wind turbines big, oil rig small!”
The full report is slated for release on December 4th during the UN Conference in Poland. Perhaps that’s when Heartland will blow the alarmist narrative out of the water with their groundbreaking bombshell of a report…
We only noticed the report’s summary was released because it was in Heartland’s weekly newsletter, in which Heartland’s H. Sterling Burnett quotes the WUWT post. Oddly, and in what is most certainly not an intentional effort to mislead readers, Burnett doesn’t mention that the quotes he includes from WUWT are actually just from Heartland’s own press release. Apparently, Burnett was simply ignorant of his own organization’s press materials and failed to recognize that he was crediting WUWT for quotes that were actually from Heartland itself.
That’s the only reasonable explanation for quoting a group’s own press release as though it’s a third-party’s original summary of the content, regarding a report they dressed up to look like the real IPCC but, obviously, is not.
But that’s how little credibility Heartland and its NIPCC report has. Heartland has long failed to fool any real reporters into covering it just as it failed to trick people into believing that a Chinese translation of a past iteration of report was an endorsement. Even Heartland’s own allies apparently couldn’t be bothered to actually read and write anything about it.
That sad copy-paste press release, found on a blog run by a former weatherboy without a college degree, was the only option Heartland deniers had for making it seem like anyone else besides people on their own payroll were talking about the report. Oh, except Watts has gotten money from Heartland too!
Like the crazy cuckoo’s parasitic brooding, the shell of Heartland’s NIPCC egg may look like the real deal on the outside, but inside? That egg is rotten. And everyone can smell it.
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