The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has recently gotten worldwide publicity. It proudly announced that well-published climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson had joined its Academic Advisory Council (AAC), finally adding someone with scientific credibilty. A week later, he quit, and affairs went downhill, as per The Guardian, HuffPost, DeSmogBlog and many others. Of course, the usual denial blogs and publications proclaimed awful behavior on the part of climate scientists.
Perhaps Dr. Bengtsson did not know that GWPF was the nearest UK equivalent to the Heartland Institute and the two were quite closely coupled.
FOIA Facts 5 - Finds Friends Of GWPF analyzed AAC Chairman David Henderson's email to a list that included 19 Heartland experts, speakers, employees or consultants. Then, another eight Heartland-related people were GWPF or AAC members, including Henderson himself. The full To: list was quite instructive.
Two years after the infamous Heartland billboard and other exposures of Heartland activities, seven GWPF AAC members are still Heartland Experts:
Robert Carter, Freeman Dyson, Indur Goklany, Richard Lindzen, Ross McKitrick, Ian Plimer, Nir Shaviv.
Robert Carter, Freeman Dyson, Indur Goklany, Richard Lindzen, Ross McKitrick, Ian Plimer, Nir Shaviv.
Both Heartland and GWPF are tax-exempt political “charities” that have little to do with science except to attack it. Perhaps Dr. Bengtsson has now learned that one is known by the company they keep and a credible scientist had fallen into very bad company. Hopefully he has indeed learned.
UPDATE 08/30/14: For more detail, see discussion at Ha ha: Lennart Bengtsson leaves advisory board of GWPF (Stoat), L'Affaire Bengtsson (Rabett Run), and Wikipedia. When a scientist starts doing silly things and lending his name to an anti-science group, calling colleagues' displeasure McCarthyism shows ignorance of the term's meaning.
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