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Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Heartland Institute CEO Joe Bast Calls Bill McKibben and Michael Mann ‘Madmen’ -- flies off to Bizarro World -- the dude is losing it!


Heartland CEO Joe Bast Calls Bill McKibben and Michael Mann ‘Madmen’



Leo blog : The Heartland Institute conference billboard in ChicagoThe Heartland Institute is doubling down on its widely-condemned effort to label leading proponents of climate science as “murderers, tyrants, and madmen.”
CEO Joe Bast has sent a letter to one of the scholars who “have expressed trepidation about continuing their long-time associations with us.” Not to worry, says Bast, we’re still into wacky hate speech, same as ever, we just will use our website — and not billboards — to smear folks. He explains:
Of course, what’s fake here is, well, pretty much every single word in this letter. Heartland lecturing folks on accuracy? If you look up chutzpah in the dictionary…
Heartland posted a statement saying “We do not apologize for running the ad.” And they kept online their original defense of the billboard, which made absurd statements like, “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” Some mistake.
Obviously, Bast stands by this nonsense. The uber-vindicated Michael Mann, one of the most highly regarded climatologists in the country, had this to say in reply to Bast:
Being called a “mad man” by Joe Bast & Heartland is like being called overexposed by Kim Kardashian.
I hope to have a response soon from the too-sane-for-this-world Bill McKibben.
How out of touch are Bast and Heartland? They post their beyond-the-pale extremism in a blog named “Somewhat Reasonable”:
In the Bizarro World of Hrtae that Heartland inhabits, I guess Somewhat Reasonable = Most Unreasonable.
Finally, Bast just can’t stop defending the billboard with nonsensical arguments.
Our billboard was factual: The Unabomber was motivated by concern over man-made global warming to do the terrible crimes he committed. He still believes in global warming. We simply put his picture on a billboard, pointed out the “inconvenient truth,” and asked, “do you?”
But wait, I thought Bast just said the billboard was a mistake? In any case, as Greenwire reported on the Unabomber’s manifesto (which you can confirm online):
The words “climate change” don’t appear in the manifesto, nor are there references to “global warming” or “carbon.”
Asked about this discrepancy, Heartland spokesman Jim Lakely pointed to a passage from Kaczynski’s manifesto that says the Industrial Revolution has “inflicted severe damage on the natural world.”
#FAIL

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