Despicable. Only way to describe this desperate ploy from the Heartlands "Institute".

Well the latest turn from the global warming denialist front really does take the prize for the most cretinist, pathetic ploy one could possibly imagine.

This fossil fuel funded PR mouthpiece commissioned a bunch of billboards in Chicago featuring some of society's lowest of the low who apparently believe in global warming - the Unabomber, Charles Manson, and even Osama Bin Laden!

This is a shallow attempt to paint everyone who believes that the world's climate experts are not trying to snowjob us as somehow as bad as these insane madmen.

And perhaps it is a sign that the denialists are getting truly desperate. Australia's emissions trading scheme comes into effect in two months. South Korea has just resolved to implement an emissions trading scheme. And so has China.
To top it off, the US Republicans look like a mob of right fruitcakes that even the right-wingers couldn't seriously support. Barack Obama is finally starting to look like a two-term president. And if the US Democrats secured majorities in both houses, then you could be pretty sure the US would move towards an emissions trading scheme too. Once the US goes, much of the rest of the world will quickly follow, and the denialists will have lost their grubby game of FUD - fear, uncertainty and doubt.

The latest news though is that a swarm of outrage at Heartlands has forced them to pull the campaign! Their website is unrepentant, and replete with spin and outright bullshit. They even try to say that their damning strategy document that was leaked a few months back was a fake!

Fakegate was the theft in early 2012 of confidential corporate documents from The Heartland Institute by Dr. Peter Gleick, a leading climate scientist and president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland, California. Gleick admitted on February 20 to using a false identity to steal the documents and then disseminating them – along with a fake memo purporting to be Heartland’s “climate strategy” – to sympathetic bloggers and journalists.

The reality is that although Gleick has admitted infiltrating heartlands and stealing various documents - including this strategy paper, he has not admitted producing any fakes. Because is wasn't a fake. Read more about the leaked documents in the Guardian.

The same games as the asbestos industry pulled to keep trading for decades past the discovery of the product's deadly nature. The same games the tobacco industry is continuing to pull to keep up their fatal trade. But these games will hurt every single person on the planet. Every one of us has to reject the denialists and their phoney arguments. Every one of us needs to get behind the political parties and players who are trying to get our nations to act - to each do our bit to reverse or at least reduce the damage from global warming.

You can make a start by contacting some of the companies funding the Heartlands Institute. There's a list here. Stunning that it includes Microsoft! Tell Bill Gates what you think of that - @BillGates on Twitter!