I wasn’t going to write about yesterday’s Heartland Institute shock-horror revelations in the Guardian because I thought it was a non-story. “Independent libertarian think-tank spends trifling* sums of money to counter the state’s liberal-left propaganda”. Gosh, hold the front page. Run it next to the story about the Pope being caught worshipping regularly in Rome and the photograph of a bear pooping behind a tree…

Since then, though, it has got much more interesting. Turns out that at least some of the “leaked” documents purporting to show the round, unvarnished face of capitalist, anti-science evil may have been faked.

Watts Up With That has the details:

My favourite giveaway clue that Watts-y has spotted is this one:

6. Key sentences are rather clumsily written and some make no sense. This contrasts with purposeful language in the other documents. This one sentence in particular has gotten a lot of attention:

His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.

I can’t imagine pitching “…dissuading teachers from teaching science.” to a board of directors at a meeting. It is a sure recipe for a public relations nightmare.

No, indeed. If you’re going to pretend to be one of the “enemy” at least have the intelligence to try to think like the “enemy” would. I know this is going to come as a major shock to the kind of foam-flecked, cerebrally-deficient eco-zealots who scrawl in red crayons for DeSmog blog or earn lavish salaries as propaganda shills for the Grantham Institute or fester at the Guardian’s environment pages, but here’s an amazing fact…

Ready for your amazing fact, fruit loop eco-loons?

OK. Here goes.

We climate realists don’t think of ourselves as anti-science.

No, really. We think we’re pro-science. That’s what we want science teachers to teach kids in schools: hard science – physics, chemistry, biology. Stuff that’s empirical. Theories that are falsifiable. Not the kind of junk science they teach in places like the school of “environmental” “science” at comedy institutions like the “University” of East Anglia. Because that’s not science at all. It’s computer-modelling, projection, which is more akin to necromancy.

So, next time you try to fake your Protocols of the Elders of Climategate document, guys, at least try to credit the people you’re trying to smear with a bit of integrity. Not everyone is like you, you realise?

* To give you an idea how trifling is the amount spent funding climate scepticism relative to the amount spent by the state nurturing climate alarmism, consider this horrifying revelation at Bishop Hill, which in turn came from Not A Lot Of People Know That:

I can…reveal that, during the financial year 2009/10 (the most recent for which the data is available), Research Council spending on “climate change research and training” amounted to £234 million. This analysis was provided by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) on behalf of Research Councils UK (RCUK).

£234 million in Britain alone? And still these junk-scientist doom-mongers can’t manage to amass sufficient evidence to win an argument against a handful of ill-funded bloggers. Says it all, really.

UPDATE

And here’s Jo Nova, putting those shocking Heartland Institute funds for climate sceptics in their proper perspective….