On February 24, The Heartland Institute published a press release from Heartland’s president Joseph Bast announcing that they’d published screen captures of several emails. While I’ll have more to say about the emails themselves in the next day or so, I wanted to briefly focus on a different point.

Toward the end of the release, Bast writes

We repeat our request that the fake climate change strategy memo be removed from Web sites and blogs such as DeSmog Blog, Think Progress, and the Huffington Post, along with documents that were stolen from Heartland. It is the ethical thing to do. [emphasis added]

Given The Heartland Institute’s history of unethical behavior, calling on others to behave ethically is the height of chutzpah.

As S&R pointed out last week, The Heartland Institute has linked to and commented approvingly of the unknown individual who illegally published the [ CRU ] emails. A quick search at Heartland on the topic of “Climategate” turns up 151 posts at The Heartland Institute on the topic.

I briefly reviewed all of the mentions of Climategate in 2011 and 2012 – not one of them calls for the Climategate emails to be removed from websites and blogs.

And as of this writing, Scott Mandia of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund reports that Heartland has not responded in any way to the letter that CSLDF and PEER sent to Heartland calling on the Institute to “immediately remove all of [the CRU emails] and any quotations taken from them, from their blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.”

Heartland is entirely within its rights to demand that others behave ethically. But given Heartland’s long history of deception, dishonesty, and hypocrisy on multiple topics, it’s entirely within the rights of others to collapse onto the floor and laugh their asses off in response to the brazenness of Heartland’s hypocrisy.