Heartland Institute responds to stolen and fake documents

Note:  IOF apologizes for the late posting of this release.   However, we feel it is important enough to pass it along even at a late date.

JDL.

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NEWS!   NEWS!

Heartland Institute responds to stolen and fake documents

FEBRUARY 15, 2012 – The following statement from The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more information, contact Communications Director Jim Lakely at jlakely@heartland.org and 312/377-4000.

Yesterday afternoon, two advocacy groups posted online several documents they claimed were The Heartland Institute’s 2012 budget, fundraising, and strategy plans. Some of these documents were stolen from Heartland, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered.

                                      

The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.

Since then, the documents have been widely reposted on the Internet, again with no effort to confirm their authenticity.

One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.

We respectfully ask all activists, bloggers, and other journalists to immediately remove all of these documents and any quotations taken from them, especially the fake “climate strategy” memo and any quotations from the same, from their blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents. We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation. We ask them in particular to immediately remove these documents and all statements about them from the blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

How did this happen? The stolen documents were obtained by an unknown person who fraudulently assumed the identity of a Heartland board member and persuaded a staff member here to “re-send” board materials to a new email address. Identity theft and computer fraud are criminal offenses subject to imprisonment. We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes.

Apologies: The Heartland Institute apologizes to the donors whose identities were revealed by this theft. We promise anonymity to many of our donors, and we realize that the major reason these documents were stolen and faked was to make it more difficult for donors to support our work. We also apologize to Heartland staff, directors, and our allies in the fight to bring sound science to the global warming debate, who have had their privacy violated and their integrity impugned.

Lessons: Disagreement over the causes, consequences, and best policy responses to climate change runs deep. We understand that.

But honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.

Those persons who posted these documents and wrote about them before we had a chance to comment on their authenticity should be ashamed of their deeds, and their bad behavior should be taken into account when judging their credibility now and in the future.

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The Heartland Institute is a 28-year-old national nonprofit organization with offices in Chicago, Illinois and Washington, DC. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site at http://www.heartland.org or call 312/377-4000.

"Deniers" Meet and the Media Ignores Them...Again

"Deniers" Meet and the Media Ignores Them...Again

By Alan Caruba

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“Denial” is not a river in Africa, nor is it a proper term for the legion of climatologists, meteorologists, geologists, and others like myself who have devoted decades to debunking the utter rubbish called “global warming.” So toxic has the term become, the charlatans pushing the fraud have long since abandoned it and begun to refer to “climate change” instead.

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and I daresay that its climate has been changing since it first cooled, oceans formed, and one-celled forms of life began to develop into complex creatures like dinosaurs, Al Gore and politicians continuing to lie about global warming.

The Fourth International Conference on Climate Change concluded Tuesday in Chicago. Sponsored by The Heartland Institute, a non-profit, free market think tank, it brought together eminent (and legitimate!) scientists and other distinguished folk for panels and speeches addressing the arcane mysteries of climate.

Among the dignitaries addressing the thousand or more people who attended was former astronaut, Harrison Schmitt, PhD, a one-term Senator who discussed why the U.S. Constitution makes no provision whatever for the Department of Energy or the Environmental Protection Agency. For three days men who know their science in ways that would fill entire libraries held forth.

A Google search for any mainstream media coverage of the event turned up little evidence of it, nor is it likely that were I to list the names of the speakers, you would have ever heard of them. These foremost “deniers” have received short shrift in a media that has been determined to convince Americans that the Earth is burning up due to an infinitesimal amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The conference was of great significance this year because the Kerry-Lieberman Cap-and-Tax bill has been introduced in the Senate for the purpose of putting limits on carbon dioxide emissions, i.e., the use of all energy; a bill without a scintilla of scientific justification, nor merit. It will, however, create the buying and selling of utterly bogus “carbon credits” to enrich utilities and those involved in the exchanges based on the global warming fraud.

It will also kill the U.S. economy.

I attended the first three conferences and, although I have been a member of the National Association of Science Writers since shortly after the last ice age ended, I confess that when some of the scientists began to get deep into the issues of climate anomalies, minutia of paleoclimatology and comparable matters, my eyes would glaze over and I would feel a strong urge to take a nap.

It occurs to me that this has long been a part of the problem for most people who either dropped out of school, slept through science class, or who preferred to ignore all the silliness of global warming being blamed for…for…for everything. The problem is that global warming or climate change is being used to manipulate the world’s population into accepting global governance that involves the loss of their nation’s sovereignty in favor of international organizations like the United Nations. A draft international treaty making the rounds would be the end of democracy.

Not surprisingly, the whole global warming scam began somewhere in the bowels of the UN, emerged with the Kyoto Climate Change Protocols, and is the basis for the waste of billions on “clean” or “alternative” energy in the form of wind and solar energy. It is a full scale attack of the very basis for modern life, the use of coal, oil, and natural gas. Those of us living in advanced societies tend to forget that vast portions of the globe have no electricity whatever. How would you like to cook your dinner over dried animal dung?

The conference and the fact that the mainstream media has once again chosen to ignore it is a shining example of why the MSM is losing readers and viewers who have correctly concluded it can no longer be trusted. Global warming? Here’s an excerpt from the latest edition of IceAgeNow.com:

UK - Coldest winter in a lifetime - Freezing in May - 12 May 10

Record Cold in Paris - 11 May 10

Snow in "sunny" Spain - Coldest May since records began - 6 May 10

Snow In Southern France - 5 May 10 Again?

Yet another Alberta snowstorm! - 5 May 10

The biggest news emerging from the conference is that, in addition to the fact that the Earth is ten years into another perfectly natural cooling cycle, it is also verging on another ice age. We are all literally at the end of an interglacial period of approximately 11,500 years.

Bundle up!

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© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.