USA TODAY “Balances” Hundreds Of Scientists With Fossil-Fuel Backed Group

Latest Paper To Mainstream Noxious Heartland Institute’s Lies.

USA TODAY became the latest mainstream newspaper to incorrectly “balance” the views of the hundreds of scientists behind a major climate report with the the Heartland Institute, a fossil-fuel-funded organization that once compared those who accept climate science to the “Unabomber.” In an op-ed published by the newspaper Tuesday, the head of the organization portrayed outright falsehoods as simply “opinion” in order to dismiss the United Nations panel behind the report as a “discredited oracle.”

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC), which convenes hundreds of top climate experts from around the world to assess the scientific understanding of climate change, stated in its most recent report that scientists are 95 percent certain that the majority of recent warming is man-made, or about as certain as they are that cigarettes kill. This is an increase from just over 50 percent certainty in 1995, and 66 percent certainty in 2001. Yet the head of the Heartland Institute, Joseph Bast, counter-factually suggested in USA TODAY that “we are no more certain about the impact of man-made greenhouse gases than we were in 1990, or even in 1979.”

Bast also falsely claimed that the IPCC “admits, but does not explain, why no warming has occurred for the past 15 years.”

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