Watch Out For Those Madmen, Tyrants, and Others Who Might Be Informed About Global Warming

That’s right. This is for real. This is a real billboard put up by the Heartland Institute in Chicago. Where to begin with this? As the Guardian said about the billboard that it is “quite possibly one of the most ill-judged poster campaigns in the history of ill-judged poster campaigns.”

            On their website Heartland Institute announces that, Besides Kaczynsky, they plan to put up other billboards with the likenesses of Fidel Castro, Osama bin Laden, and Charles Manson and say that “The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.”

            Who thought this campaign up? An unschooled eight-year-old? The folks at the Heartland Institute now realize possibly that there is no intellectual underpinning to their attacks on climate scientists. So they have reduced themselves to this almost surreal swipe. My desire for this blog is to write about how we think about the environment. I almost hate to include this billboard. I don’t think much thought went into putting it up.


Update 5/5/12: Apparently you can only push stupid so far. After criticism that even came from their supporters, the Heartland Institute pulled down this stupid billboard. The billboard was only up for a matter of hours. One of the heartland Institute's allies, Anthony Watts, attributed the ill-conceived ad campaign to battle fatigue. I think that it's more basic than that: when you believe stupid things, you do stupid things.