Denial conference scheduled for March in New York

Someone with the talents of Mencken or Swift ought to take on the Heartland Institute. As it is, the page about them in Sourcewatch explains their ties to the tobacco industry and gives a quick sketch of their agenda: "The Heartland Institute, according to the Institute's web site, is a nonprofit organization 'to discover and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems'. It campaigns on what it calls 'junk science', 'common-sense environmentalism' (i.e. anti-Kyoto, pro-GM), the privatization of public services, smokers' rights (anti-tobacco tax, denial of problems from passive smoking), the introduction of school vouchers, and the deregulation of health care insurance. It also provides an online resource for finding right-wing think tank policy documents called PolicyBot."

Real Climate reports that these swell guys are holding a pseudo-scientific conference to generate PR for climate change denial. The Real Climate poster does an amusing job of explaining the difference between a genuine scientific conference and Heartland's festival of shills, scheduled to take place in New York March 2-4. He urges his readers to accept the all-expenses invitation that Heartland is dangling in front of real scientists and skip the tobacco-science lectures.