Climate Change Skeptics Meet [Insert Hot-Air Joke Here]

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The skeptics are coming to town! As the NY Times reports today, 600 climate-change deniers are currently holed up in a hotel in New York City for the International Conference on Climate Change. The conference’s organizers? None other than the conservative Chicago-based think tank The Heartland Institute, of Exxon-Mobil funding fame (as Mother Jones reported in 2005.)

Heartland Institute president Joseph L. Bast has posted his opening remarks on the institute’s website. The basic message? We ARE NOT a fringe movement:

These scientists and economists have been published thousands of
times in the world’s leading scientific journals and have written
hundreds of books. If you call this the fringe, where’s the center?

Hey Jim Martin, does this look like a phone booth to you?

Hey RealClimate, can you hear us now?

The skeptic doth protest too much, methinks.

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Owned by no one—except you.

We just keep seeing it happen: Newsrooms owned by billionaires and corporations are spinning their own narratives, overwriting the truth, following only stories that keep them in the pocket of those with even more power.

Not here. We’re not owned by anyone. We’re not part of any cult that demands our allegiance to a bottom line. We’ve spoken up and spoken out while other newsrooms changed their stories—or cut them altogether—to keep the C suite happy.

Our mission is to find the truth and amplify it. That’s why we’re independent, nonprofit, and, crucially, funded by readers. The investigations on our website will always be free to read, watch, and listen to, but our newsroom is powered by readers who pitch in what they can so we can keep asking the hard questions.

Can you chip in today?

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