Documents suggesting that a U.S. think-tank plans to push for a
public school curriculum questioning climate change is a worrisome sign,
top scientists say.
The leaked papers from the nonprofit organization the Heartland
Institute has created a buzz within the scientific community as the
American Association for the Advancement of Science gathers in
Vancouver. This is the first time it is holding its annual meeting
outside of the United States.
The documents, which were released via email and then reposted on
blogs, say school teachers and principals are “heavily biased toward the
alarmist perspective.”
Scientists say it is a frightening sign that much of the public remains skeptical about global warming.
“There are forces at work,” said Nina Fedoroff, president of the
AAAS. “The polling data show that the fraction of citizens who believe
that climate change is real has declined since 2006. Even as the
scientific consensus has increased, the belief in it has declined.”
The Heartland Institute, which is based in Chicago and Washington,
released a statement saying the documents were stolen and that at least
one of the hundreds of pages posted by advocacy groups is fake and that
other pages may have been altered.
Some of the pages that are not in dispute by the institute include a
list of donors and an action plan to spend hundreds of thousands of
dollars to influence recall elections in the U.S. Other documents show
that nearly $20 million U.S. has been spent on promoting bloggers and
researchers who express doubt about global warming.
The institute did not respond to a request for comment Thursday, but
in its statement said the documents were stolen by an unknown person
fraudulently assuming the identity of a board member who persuaded a
staff member to resend board materials to a new email address.
“We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes,” the statement said.
Federoff, head of an organization representing 10 million people
around the world, said the climate-change denial forces within the
Republican Party are particularly troubling.
“We clutch our heads and say how can this be in 21st-century U.S. —
the most scientifically sophisticated in the world — that we have a
whole denial phenomenon in politics? It’s just really odd,” she said.
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