The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania

There is a book called "The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania" produced by the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute is famous for doing all that work to prove that smoking is not bad for you, and more recently, that climate change is not real or is not important or is not human-caused etc. etc. Heartland is a libertarian "think" tank that receives money form big corporate interests like Tobacco and Petroleum and then uses that money to advance the interests of those corporate entities, regardless of the actual truth of the situation. They also use some of their money to threaten law suits against people like me who object to their activities. (But they do so very ineffectively.)

This is one of those books that contains political propaganda, is printed in large(ish) numbers, then sent around to teachers, academics, policy makers, etc. whether they want a copy or not; it is a sort of high level form of spam. You may remember Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) or J. Philippe Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior : A Life History Perspective (2nd Special Abridged Edition), also produced by entities with an anti-social (in this case, racist) agenda, with piles of free copies sent out to a gazillion people. This is the same thing, but for climate change. It is a climate denialist book.

I'm not going to critique The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania because my friend and colleague John Abraham has already done a great job of that:

Heartland Institute wastes real scientists' time – yet again

This spring, I began receiving calls and emails from colleagues about a strange little book that was mailed to environmental science professors around the country. This was a big mailing, in total, a reported 100,000 copies were sent out. What was it about this little book that got us talking? Many things. First....

CLICK HERE to read John's excellent blog post. You won't want to miss this. Also, while you are there look at the other posts at John's new blog, written with Dana Nuccitelli.

Since we are on the subject of books and science denialism, may I recommend that you read, if you've not already, Shawn Otto's excellent book Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America.

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