Documents purpose to reveal Heartland's efforts to discredit climate research. Heartland burned by 'DenialGate'

Documents leaked online purport to reveal the inner workings of the Heartland Institute, showing the libertarian group trying to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors like the Charles G. Koch Foundation while planning to sow doubts in classrooms and the news media about global warming science.

The group’s efforts included plans to develop school curricula labeling climate research as “controversial and uncertain,” and attempts to cultivate alliances with influential figures such as New York Times environmental blogger Andrew Revkin, based on memos and fundraising documents published Tuesday by the left-leaning DeSmogBlog.


The Chicago-based Heartland Institute said Wednesday that at least one of the items — a two-page “ Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy” — was "a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit the group."

Some of the other documents “may have been altered,” the institute said in a statement issued nearly 24 hours after the documents were first posted online.

The institute said it was still working to confirm the authenticity of the other documents, although it said some of them appear to have been stolen “by an unknown person who fraudulently assumed the identity of a Heartland board member and persuaded a staff member here to ‘resend’ board materials to a new email address.”

The institute asked publications that reprinted the documents to take them down, and threatened to pursue civil “and possibly criminal” charges and “collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation." It said the person who contacted the group for the materials was guilty of identity theft and computer fraud.

"We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes," the group said.

But the institute’s critics said the documents — if legitimate — offer global warming skeptics a taste of their own medicine after the 2009 theft of thousands of stolen emails from prominent climate scientists. The resulting controversy, known as “Climategate,” opened the door to allegations that the researchers had colluded and manipulated their data, and fueled attacks on U.N.-led climate negotiations and the Obama administration’s climate policies.

The purported Heartland documents are “a window into the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on humanity in the modern era," said Brendan DeMelle, managing editor of the DeSmogBlog. “It's Denialgate if there ever was one.”

"These documents speak for themselves," added Dan Lashof, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's climate and air program.

DeSmogBlog’s editors told POLITICO that they had received the documents Tuesday from an anonymous tipster who dubbed himself a "Heartland insider." The blog posted them about an hour later without contacting the Heartland Institute for confirmation.

After the Heartland Institute issued its news release, the DeSmogBlog editors released a statement pointing to similarities between the "Climate Strategy" document and the others it had also posted online.

The blog added that it "has received no direct communications from the Heartland Institute identifying any misstatement of fact in the 'Climate Strategy' document and is therefore leaving the material available to those who may judge their content and veracity based on these and other sources."

Included in both the "Climate Strategy” and a separate fundraising document is a proposal to spend $100,000 to hire David Wojick, a senior consultant to the Energy Department’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information, to work on alternative classroom materials on climate science for kindergartners through 12th graders.

"Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective," the memo said, adding that "his effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain — two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science."

The fundraising memo also describes the group's reliance on an anonymous donor who gave $979,000 in 2011, about 20 percent of its overall revenue. The nonprofit group is also trying to increase its fundraising totals for 2012 by 70 percent, to $7.7 million, the document said.

The climate fundraising strategy lists nearly 90 past donors who are again being targeted for contributions of $10,000 or more, including R.J. Reynolds's parent company Reynolds American, Microsoft, Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable, Contran Corp., the General Motors Foundation and the Charles G. Koch Foundation, which gave $25,000 in 2011 and is projected to give $200,000 in 2012.

"We expect to push up their level of support in 2012 and gain access to their network of philanthropists, if our focus continues to align with their interests," the "Climate Strategy" memo said of the Koch foundation. "Other contributions will be pursued for this work, especially from corporations whose interests are threatened by climate policies."

Atop the Heartland Institute’s purported 2012 budget is a plan to spend about $388,000 on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, a team of writers paid "to undermine" the latest scientific reports from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The group also plans to continue payments for several "high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist [anthropogenic global warming] message," including $11,600 per month to Craig Idso, $5,000 per month plus expenses to Fred Singer, and $1,667 per month to Robert Carter. All three are prominent climate skeptics.

According to the strategy memo that the Heartland Institute labeled a fake, other media campaigns include an effort to beef up the institute’s presence on Forbes’s blog to counter high-profile climate scientists like Peter Gleick, who also has been using the site. The memo says the group also proposes "cultivating more neutral voices with big audiences," including Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry and the Times’s Revkin.

Plans described in the fundraising memo also involve helping climate skeptic Anthony Watts raise $88,000 for his blog, which aims to debunk local meteorological reports on record high and low temperatures. (The documents say $44,000 has already been earmarked for Watts’s project from Heartland’s anonymous donor.) And outside of the climate issue, the memo says the group plans to raise $100,000 to continue its work defending hydraulic fracturing with plans to "approach dozens of companies and trade associations that are actively seeking allies in this battle."

Revkin, author of The New York Times blog Dot Earth, said he was confused by the Heartland Institute’s apparent interest in targeting him given the group’s own writings challenging him on the subject of climate change.

"Not too long ago, Heartland called me 'a noted ally of the alarmist camp,’” Revkin wrote in an email to POLITICO. "I do have a different read of some climate science and policy issues than the folks they say I have 'antipathy' for, but that hardly means I'm open to Heartland cultivating me.

"Finally, I don't know why they would think I'm neutral," Revkin added. "I'm a passionate advocate, actually — for reality. By that I mean I try to keep in mind the full picture of greenhouse-driven climate change revealed by science, including aspects that are well understood and those that remain veiled by durable complexity and real uncertainty."

Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he didn’t see anything unusual in the information inside the materials purportedly from the Heartland Institute. Environmental groups also try to distribute climate science curriculum in schools, and it's quite common for groups to spell out high fundraising expectations headed into a new year, he said.

"We have memos like that too," Ebell said. "I don't think you'll find a difference between how groups on the left and groups on the right try to raise money."

Ebell also serves as chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group of climate skeptics that includes the Heartland Institute.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 1:47 p.m. on February 15, 2012.