Originally Posted by
CanoePilot
Your level of wilful ignorance is dangerous and people who subscribe to your line of thinking are dangerous to our country and to the west.
I think you must be describing yourself.
Connection with Heartland Institute
The Heartland Institute published Watts' preliminary report on weather station data, titled Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? Watts has appeared as a paid speaker at the International Conference on Climate Change the Heartland Institute have sponsored since 2008.
Watts says that he approached Heartland in 2011 to ask for help finding a donor to set up a website devoted to presenting NOAA's data as graphs that are easily accessible to the public. Documents obtained from the Heartland Institute in February 2012 revealed that the Institute had agreed to help Watts raise $88,000 for his project.The documents state that $44,000 had already been pledged by an anonymous donor, and the Institute would seek to raise the rest. Watts has written that, aside from the help in funding this project, the Heartland Institute does not pay him a regular salary or fund his blog.
The Heartland Institute is an American conservative and libertarian public policy think tank founded in 1984 and based in Arlington Heights, Illinois in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. The Institute conducts work on issues including education reform, government spending, taxation, healthcare, education, tobacco policy, global warming, hydraulic fracturing, information technology, and free-market environmentalism.
In the 1990s, the Heartland Institute worked with the tobacco company Philip Morris to question or deny the health risks of secondhand smoke and to lobby against smoking bans. More recently, the Heartland Institute is the primary American supporter of climate change denial. It rejects the scientific consensus that global warming poses a significant danger to the planet and that human activity is driving it, and says that policies to fight it would be damaging to the economy.