UPDATE: Heartland announced on Friday evening that they are pulling the billboard.
Remember when the climate-deniers at the Heartland Institute were all, “Hey, play nice and have some ‘common decency’ over our ‘honest disagreement’ about whether or not the earth is warming”? So much for that.
The Guardian posted a photo on Friday of a Heartland billboard near Chicago that compares everyone who believes that climate change is real to the Unabomber. The billboard features a photo of Ted Kaczynski with “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” in giant, crimson letters. In a press release, Heartland said it also plans billboards featuring Charles Manson and Fidel Castro, and potentially Osama bin Laden and James J. Lee (they guy who held people hostage at Discovery Channel headquarters a few years ago). From their press release explaining the billboards:
The point is that believing in global warming is not “mainstream,” smart, or sophisticated. In fact, it is just the opposite of those things. Still believing in man-made global warming – after all the scientific discoveries and revelations that point against this theory – is more than a little nutty. In fact, some really crazy people use it to justify immoral and frightening behavior.
Of course, not all global warming alarmists are murderers or tyrants. But the Climategate scandal and the more recent Fakegate scandal revealed that the leaders of the global warming movement are willing to break the law and the rules of ethics to shut down scientific debate and implement their left-wing agendas.
Obviously this is a stupid, crass publicity stunt aimed to gin up media ahead of their big climate-denial-palooza conference later in May. But it was only a few months ago that Heartland was complaining that it had been unfairly maligned when a batch of internal documents was released online outlining their funding and outreach strategies, and we should all just get along and be nice to each other. Yes, that’s exactly what they want.
