Monday, July 01, 2013

Heartland Institute Vs. Chinese Academy Of Science, Round II

Last week the Heartland Institute got into it with Chinese Academy of Science.  The academy had seen fit to translate  HI's  Climate Change Reconsidered reports, and PR guy Jim Lakely from the institute suggested that this counted as an endorsement of the think-tank's position re global warming.  But no; CAS begged to differ, in fairly strong terms, and Lakeley was forced to issue an apology/retraction.

Now, however, we find that HI's words were hollow.  CEO Joe Bast writes:

Regrettably, the lies of some advocates, perhaps aided by confusion caused by the language barrier, led Chinese officials to threaten to cancel a planned workshop in Beijing for some of the authors and translators of Climate Change Reconsidered. With four scientists representing The Heartland Institute already in Beijing, we agreed to remove the news release and the book itself from our Web site.

Now that the workshop has been successfully concluded, we have restored our original news release...

So once they got their boys thehelloutta China, they went back to their original, misleading statement.

I emailed CAS once again to see if they had any further response to this latest bit of trickery, and they responded as follows:

Dear Mr. Murphy,

It's very kind of you to remind us the repost of the Heartland release. We have notice it last week. The CAS attitude towards the translated book had been made clear in the statements on June 15 as follows: http://english.cas.cn/Ne/CASE/201306/t20130615_104625.shtml. We are sure that we have sent you the translator's preface in our last email, in which the translator had addressed his views on climate change and on the translation of the book.

We hope to receive your continuing focus on the Chinese Academy of Sciences, both on its scientific efforts&achievements and on its official website.


Best,
Chinese Academy of Sciences

Which, to me at least, suggests they are really, really tired of the Heartland Institute and the whole clown show HI inflicted on them.  I suspect that this will be the last bit of cooperating we see between HI and CAS for a long while.

2 comments:

EliRabett said...

The real message here is what the Chinese said they would do to the Freds if he didn't back down. Now those are some Emails Eli would love to see.

jrkrideau said...

One has to love the Heartland line The statement we posted to appease Chinese officials appears here. I don't think Joe Bast is a diplomat.