Forecast the Facts
In addition, Bradley is recommending a $200,000 grant in renewed support for ALEC in 2016 as it continues to build a "comprehensive communications infrastructure" in response to citizen campaigns targeting its funders. The grant summary reads: "ALEC has been under sustained, organized attack from the Left for several years, as well-documented in Bradley Prize recipient Kimberly Strassel's new book The Intimidation Game: How the Left Silences Free Speech. Under Executive Director Lisa Nelson and at Bradley's urging, ALEC is aggressively, but thoughtfully responding." "The plan consciously mimics the Left's Citizen Engagement Laboratory (CEL)...the parent organization of Forecast the Facts and Color of Change."
ALEC also redesigned and beefed up its website, deployed more social media, and partnered with CrowdSkout a data analytics company to track, view and engage supporters (ALEC, Grant Proposal Record, 8/16/2016).
Bradley outlines the bigger game plan for ALEC: "The larger plan also has an important component for aggressive 'opposition research,' which has yielded many beneficial outcomes, including to Strassel for her helpful book, among others." This last comment in the Bradley documents suggests that ALEC provided Wall Street Journal editorial writer Kim Strassel with information for her book Intimidation Game. In it, Strassel portrayed the sustained citizen campaigning against ALEC as a well-funded, nefarious effort to crush the "free speech" rights of ALEC and its enormous funders, including Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, Pfizer, and ALTRIA/Phillip Morris (Strassel received a $250,000 Bradley Prize in 2014).
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Forecast the Facts is a grassroots human rights organization dedicated to ensuring that Americans hear the truth about climate change: that temperatures are increasing, human activity is largely responsible, and that our world is already experiencing the effects. We do this by empowering everyday people to speak out in the face of misinformation and hold accountable those who mislead the public.
Forecast the Facts draws its name from its launch campaign, which focused on accountability for broadcast meteorologists. We are continuing to work extensively on that issue, but are also expanding our efforts to push back against climate change denial wherever it occurs. We led a national campaign to call on corporations to pull their support from the Heartland Institute, a leading “think tank” in the effort to deny climate science. Most recently, we've been challenging political leaders to end their climate silence, starting with President Barack Obama.
http://forecastthefacts.org/about/
Brad Johnson until recently was the campaign manager of Forecast the Facts, a grassroots organization dedicated to accountability on the climate crisis and scientific integrity. Previously, he was the editor of ThinkProgress Green, and continues to blog at Climate Progress. Brad holds a master's degree in geosciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the co-author of Technomanifestos, a history of the Information Revolution, and is the founder of HillHeat.com, which covers climate policy in Washington. Brad has appeared on national and local television and radio, and is a regular speaker on climate policy and politics.
Brad is writing on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and how its Republican majority has shifted to the right under committee chairman Lamar Smith. His three-part investigation will be published by The Huffington Post in late June.
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COMPANIES ENDING HEARTLAND INSTITUTE FUNDING
due to climate change denial campaigns:
- General Motors -- LA Times
- Diageo -- the Guardian
- Pepsi, BB&T and Eli Lilly -- Forecast the Facts
Heartland's entire Finance, Insurance and Real Estate program (now the R Street Institute), including:
- State Farm -- see their Facebook announcement
- The Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers (ABIR) -- see CEO Brad Kading's letter to Heartland President Joseph Bast
- Allied World Assurance, USAA, XL Group and Renaissance Reinsurance -- Forecast the Facts
- RenaissanceRe's Robert Lamendola resigned from Heartland's board of directors -- E&E News ClimateWire
Farmer's Insurance and Nationwide Insurance have also confirmed (E&E News ClimateWire) they will not support the Heartland Institute. **Microsoft** has stated that "the Heartland Institute’s position on climate change is diametrically opposed to Microsoft’s position. And we completely disagree with the group’s inflammatory and distasteful advertising campaign."
SEE FORECAST THE FACTS FOR A FULL LOOK AT CORPORATE FUNDERS WHO HAVE LEFT OR STAYED WITH THE HEARTLAND INSTITUTE'S CLIMATE SCIENCE DENIAL
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http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-institute-attacks-forecast-facts-denies-its-climate-change-denial
dan s
On April 24, Heartland Institute President Joe Bast issued an angry missiveattacking Forecast the Facts, a new campaign that successfully petitionedautomobile giant General Motors to end their financial support of Heartland earlier this month. In a 2,000-word screed, Bast defended his organization's efforts to disseminate anti-science propaganda to public classrooms and the general public, while making a number of wildly inaccurate claims about our group.
While much of what Bast wrote does not warrant a reply, we felt it important to address the most pernicious falsehoods, and also to remind Heartland's corporate donors exactly why support for the organization is so untenable (although Bast does an excellent job of that himself).
The saddest and most offensive attack on Forecast the Facts is the Heartland president's suggestion that the more than 20,000 signatories of our successful petition to General Motors may not even exist, calling the petition a “fraud.” We stand by the validity of our petition one hundred percent. But even more so, we proudly affirm the existence of our members and their commitment to fighting climate change denial. The signers of the petition are real people with valid email accounts and sincere concerns that major corporations continue to support Heartland's climate change denial. (You can see some of their powerful comments here).
While Bast directs his venom at the everyday Americans who comprise the Forecast the Facts campaign, it's clear that his primary intent is to soothe the concerns of his corporate donors, many of whom are now reconsidering their support of his organization. If anything, his rant lays bare just how disreputable Bast is.
In a truly Orwellian turn, Bast vehemently denies Heartland Institute's climate change denial. (As a reminder for those less familiar with Bast, his primary focus before becoming a leader in the climate change denial movement was to question the links between smoking and lung cancer at the behest of Philip Morris, which remains a Heartland backer.)
The Heartland Institute has for decades been a leading attacker of the mainstream definition of “climate change” – the scientific conclusion that the burning of fossil fuels threatens ecosystems and human society by rapidly warming the planet with an artificially intensified greenhouse effect. Attempting to mollify his corporate supporters, Bast uses red herrings and solipsistic arguments to deny Heartland's denial.
“The Heartland Institute does not 'deny the existence of climate change,'” Bast writes, arguing that the group concedes the fact that the earth's climate changes over time. Bast also concedes that “some warming occurred in the second half of the twentieth century,” because every study of planetary temperatures, even those funded by the denialist Koch brothers, have confirmed rapid warming in recent decades.
Bast continues, “Since Heartland does not deny climate change is occurring, and in fact is bringing together the world’s leading scientists and economists to study the issue, it is entirely appropriate that corporations and foundations that have publicly stated their concern over climate change would continue to fund us.” The “leading scientists and economists” the Heartland Institute gathers are in fact a motley crew of ideologues with ties to the fossil-fuel industry, almost none of whom have done peer-reviewed work in climate science. In contrast, practically every major scientific organization on the planet has affirmed the threat of man-made global warming....
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http://engagementlab.org/static/files/FtF-Heartland-Campaign.pdf
july 2012 20 co's bail many insurance, verizon, pepsi, gsk
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2014
Forecast the Facts attacked
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William O'Keefe is a multimillionaire and former paid lobbyist for ExxonMobil. I'm a 24-year-old living in a basement in Oakland, California.
So when I woke up to see William O'Keefe had attacked me by name in The Hill for calling out his climate denial, I was pretty pleased: if a guy like that feels the need to respond to everyday activists like us, it means the climate deniers are on the defense.
But we've got much more work to do: The Hill and many other media outlets are still publishing climate denial every day. That's why, in 2015, we'll be investing big in our efforts to call out media outlets that give a platform to denial.
You can expect constant media monitoring, big social media and email campaigns when a denier is given air time, ad buys calling out specific media outlets, and more. But we'll need your help raising the funds to make that investment possible.
Climate deniers are fighting hard on behalf of the enormously wealthy fossil fuel industry to delegitimize the scientific consensus that human activity — and specifically carbon pollution — is the root cause of rapid global warming.
Unfortunately for the deniers, we're just getting started in our fight for media accountability on climate — and we're already seeing progress. In the past year, both The Guardian and The Washington Post have launched initiatives to put climate front and center. Plus, we've already spoken with the opinions editor at The Hill, and he's assured us he and the other editors are discussing how to better manage climate misinformation.
With your help, we can kick our media accountability campaigns into high gear and get editors talking about how to stop enabling deniers to miseducate the public. Many of these journalists are already on our side — and with enough resources, we can push them to change their climate reporting for the better.
Factually yours,
Sylvie and the rest of the Forecast the Facts team
MORE INFORMATION
"The Hill must do better on climate," The Hill, 4-6-2015
http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/998?t=6&akid=769.100725.YAwUQE
"Forecast the Facts, merchants of smear," The Hill, 4-1-2015
http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/997?t=8&akid=769.100725.YAwUQE
"To the media: Don’t help the 'Merchants of Doubt," The Hill, 3-23-2015
http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/996?t=10&akid=769.100725.YAwUQE
"Climate change: Why the Guardian is putting threat to Earth front and centre," The Guardian, 3-6-2015
http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/999?t=12&akid=769.100725.YAwUQE
"Introducing The Post's new energy and environment section," The Washington Post, 1-22-2015
http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/936?t=14&akid=769.100725.YAwUQE
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http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/energy-environment/237502-forecast-the-facts-merchants-of-smear
This piece is in response to a Congress Blog piece by Sylvie Steinof Forecast the Facts that takes issue with O'Keefe's previous piece in the Contributors section.
Sylvie Stein's recent piece in the Congress Blog, "Don't help the merchants of doubt," tells a great deal about Stein and her organization. Stein and the authors of "Merchants of Doubt" are skilled in distortion and being practitioners of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, especially the rule to "pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."
It is telling that Stein wants her views and those of climate alarmists to be conveyed by the media, but not those of people who challenge them. What does that say about her organization's views of the Constitution and the importance of free speech to a free society? Movements to suppress free speech believe that the end justifies the means. That is unsettling.
The word "denier" has been used by some to equate skeptics of the climate orthodoxy to deniers of the Holocaust. That is shameless. Neither I nor those I associate with deny that climate change and global warming are real or that human activities impact climate. That is far different than human activities being the major cause of warming and extreme weather events like hurricanes.
Her attacks are based on "Merchants of Doubt" and an alleged "97 [percent] consensus" of scientists. That foundation shows the weakness of her case. The movie "Merchants of Doubt" is based on a book by Naomi Oreskes that defames and slanders the good names and reputations of three outstanding scientists who cannot defend themselves because they are deceased. The George C. Marshall Institute published a critique, "Clouding the Truth: A Critique of Merchants of Doubt" in 2013; another critique is "A critique of Oreskes et al. 2008." Truth and accuracy are victims of Naomi Oreskes's piece of work.
Using the "97 percent" canard typifies the tactic of repeating a lie until it is accepted. Surveys claiming the 97 percent consensus have been thoroughly refuted. The most recent survey by John Cook involved reviewing cited abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Professor David Legates and co-authors dismembered Cook's 97 percent in an article in *Science and Education*. They reviewed the same papers cited by Cook and found "only 41 — 0.3 percent — of the 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 (scientists?) expressing an opinion had been found to endorse" the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming.
Stein's claims that "when CO2 levels have risen, so have global temperatures" or that the world has been warming rapidly are refuted by geological history, U.S. temperature records since the end of the Little Ice Age, satellite data and the most recent warming pause. Most scientists agree that a doubling of carbon dioxide would only raise temperature about 1 degree unless there is increased climate sensitivity, which has not been demonstrated. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) keeps reducing its "estimate" of sensitivity. The real issue is sensitivity; not carbon dioxide levels.
Stein attempts to use the ocean's storage capacity to explain the warming pause since 1998. But oceanographers acknowledge that good data on ocean warming have only been available for about 20 years. So her point lacks credibility. Carl Wunsch, professor of oceanography at MIT, observes that oceans have been warming since the end of the last glaciation over 10,000 years ago and will continue to warm until the next glaciation.
Finally, Stein attempts to discredit me by allegations about funding. As Ted Koppel told former Vice President Gore when he used the same tactic on ABC's "Nightline": "The measure of good science is neither the politics of the scientist nor the people with whom the scientist associates. It is the immersion of hypotheses into the acid of truth. That's the hard way to do it, but it's the only way that works." The Marshall Institute's publications are publicly available and have stood the test of time.
Stein needs to be reminded of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's (D-N.Y.) admonition that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts." Stein is very short on facts.
O'Keefe is CEO of the George C. Marshall Institute and president of Solutions Consulting, Inc.