Leaked Documents Allegedly Detail Campaign to Undermine Legitimate Climate Science

Chicago’s Heartland Institute, the self-described “conservative” and “libertarian” “think tank” is infamous for the role it played in Phillip Morris’s 1990’s bid to decouple the causal link between second-hand smoke and lung cancer. The group is coming back into the PR spotlight after 10 documents alleged to be internal communications and documentation were leaked by an anonymous donor, as announced by climate science bloggers Desmogblog today.

Details are scant right now. The leaker, referred to as “Heartland Insider”, is reported to have released the documents for as-of-yet undisclosed reasons. However, if they turn out to be real, this could be quite damning to not only for the Heartland Institute, but for HI’s scientist-on-retainer Dr. S. Fred Singer and those famous fossil-fuel magnates and lobbyists the Koch Brothers.

The documents include a scanned memo highlighting a campaign to confer their climate-change skepticism to kids grade k-12 with some sort of project with one “Dr. David Wojick.” Here’s the quote:

“Development of our “Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms” project.Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. To counter this we areconsidering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We arepursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. 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. We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $100,000 for 20 modules in 2012, with funding pledged by the Anonymous Donor.”

Two particularly disheartening points made here include the “two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.” and the influence of this “Anonymous Donor”, whom the memo reports as a regular contributor of “about 20% of [Heartland Institute’s] total 2011 revenue.”

Speaking to the authenticity of the leaked documents, Desmogblog reports that contributor Dr. John Mashey corroborates they are real:

John Mashey completely corroborates the authenticity of leaked Heartland Institute budget, planning and fundraising documents released on the DeSmogBlog earlier today.

You can DL the documents as a .ZIP file here, or from Desmogblog’s original post.