Last week, we got a fundraising email from the Heartland Institute, begging for funds for its newest project. They're not entirely reliant on grifting the public for donations just yet, though, since they seem to have a mysterious deep-pocketed donor offering to match donations.
Over a decade ago, conspiracy/denial blog runner and former weatherman Anthony Watts was convinced that the whole climate change scare was actually a result of temperature records being wrong because the thermometer stations were being artificially warmed by asphalt and concrete and buildings. He set out to prove it, got some Koch money to prop him up, had a few real scientists with degrees help him, and … confirmed that the consensus data was accurate, and if anything, that the official record was a bit cooler than it should be. Whoops!
Despite promising to honor the findings, Watts of course denied them, since they debunked his disinformation.
Twelve years later, Watts could be enjoying life as a "somewhat poorer" (but apparently not that much poorer) retired divorcee [more on that later —Ed.]. Instead, he is still trying to recruit fresh blood to his climate change denial cause, and is still committed to the lie that the thermometers are all wrong. He's now setting up his own thermometer network to once again try and prove that the record warming confirmed by every official meteorological agency in the world is actually an artifact of there being more concrete now, as though climate scientists are unaware of the existence of cities.
Last year, oil-and-tobacco-backed Heartland Institute was paying Watts for a rerun of the weather station project that he had abandoned in 2012 when it got debunked, but this year, it looks like they're once again back at it, because who needs new ideas when you can just keep running the same failed experiment over and over?
For the low-low price of just $2,000, you too can sponsor one of Heartland's new "private network of technologically superior temperature stations," and a mystery donor will match as much or as little as you donate.
While we obviously think that literally any other use of that money would be wiser, the fact that Heartland's making the data live and public means that it's going to be hard for them to cook the books, so it’ll be all the more entertaining when their "Global Open Atmospheric Temperature System," or GOATS, once again confirms the warming trend.
But since Watts has a rich history of misrepresenting studies, no doubt he'll try to spin his own research as well, or otherwise just deny its validity, like he did a decade ago when he tried this exact same stunt!
We know it's warming. We know these thermometers are going to confirm it. The only thing we don't know is who's stupid enough to waste their money backing this zombie denial project.
Oh wait, one more question: Are the $2,000 stations going to be purchased from Anthony Watts' side hustle running a weather monitoring parts store registered to a $795,000 home purchased last year in Nevada?