Rosen's Rocky column cited global warming skeptics event, omitted conservative think tank's role
Summary: Writing in his Rocky Mountain News column about what he termed a "growing contingent of scientists" who have been "brave enough to stand athwart the politically fashionable global warming steamroller," Mike Rosen stated that "[m]ore than 500 such skeptics" attended the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in March. But he failed to mention that the event was sponsored by the "free-market" Heartland Institute, which has received financial backing from ExxonMobil Corp.
In his April 25 Rocky Mountain News column, Mike Rosen cited the views of what he characterized as a "growing contingent of scientists [who have] been brave enough to stand athwart the politically fashionable global warming steamroller," noting that "[m]ore than 500 such skeptics convened in New York at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change last month." Rosen did not note that the event was sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a "free-market" think tank that, as Colorado Media Matters has noted, has received funding from ExxonMobil Corp. and is led by a president who has described the scientific consensus on global warming as a "mass delusion."
From Mike Rosen's April 25 Rocky Mountain News column, "Global Warming Hysteria":
A growing contingent of scientists has been brave enough to stand athwart the politically fashionable global warming steamroller. More than 500 such skeptics convened in New York at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change last month. They argue factually and persuasively that what warming the world has seen in the last hundred years is at best minimal and at worst exaggerated.
Conversely, radical increases in global temperatures or rising sea levels proclaimed by Al Gore and his ilk aren't facts. They're merely guesses, some of them hysterical, about conditions decades or centuries into the future and based on assumptions about innumerable variables, many of which are beyond our scientific comprehension and expertise.
Rosen's citation of the Heartland Institute-sponsored 2008 International Conference on Climate Change echoed conversations he had on the April 15 broadcast of his Newsradio 850 KOA show in an interview with Heartland senior fellow for legal affairs, Maureen Martin, when she discussed the conference. As Colorado Media Matters pointed out, according to Heartland President Joseph L. Bast, the event brought together "more than 200 scientists and other experts on climate change" who have "stood up to political correctness and defended the scientific method at a time when doing so threatens their research grants, tenure, and ability to get published. Some of them have even faced death threats for daring to speak out against what can only be called the mass delusion of our time."
As Colorado Media Matters further noted, the think tank received $115,000 from ExxonMobil in 2006. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, from 1998 to 2005 Heartland received $561,500 from the fossil fuels company, including $119,000 in 2005 alone. The think tank maintains a separate "Global Warming Facts" Web page that promotes books by and offers links to the works of authors critical of mainstream climate-change theories, as well as a "Primer on Global Warming" section with links for topics such as "There is no consensus."
A monthly Heartland publication, Environment & Climate News, has published numerous articles promoting skepticism of global warming's anthropogenic causes, even though organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change share the consensus view that, as stated in a June 2006 NAS report, "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming" of the planet. Additionally, as Colorado Media Matters noted, the managing editor of Environment & Climate News, James Taylor, made several misleading and debunked claims regarding global warming when he appeared on the March 20 broadcast of KBDI Channel 12's Independent Thinking with host and Independence Institute President Jon Caldara.
Heartland promotes itself as a "free-market" research and education organization:
Heartland's mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. Such solutions include parental choice in education, choice and personal responsibility in health care, market-based approaches to environmental protection, privatization of public services, and deregulation in areas where property rights and markets do a better job than government bureaucracies.
As Colorado Media Matters pointed out, on his July 31, 2007, broadcast, Rosen promoted Heartland, along with several other sources, as providing what he called "good, solid, hard rebuttals" of the scientific consensus that human activity is largely responsible for a rise in global temperatures in recent decades.
— E.B.
Posted to the web on Monday April 28, 2008 at 8:04 PM EST