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As Leo Hickman writes at the Guardian, perhaps the most disturbing piece of the Heartland leak is this phrase: "...key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science."
Right there you have the true goal of it all: Dissuading the teaching of science.
Deniergate is simply another chapter in the half a millenia-long war against knowledge that started against Copernicus. It never ends, not really.
From the memo:
Development of our "Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms" project.
Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. To counter this we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at thevU.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. 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. We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $100,000 for 20 modules in 2012, with funding pledged byvthe Anonymous Donor.
To me, the phrase "preventing teachers from teaching science" is a smoking gun evincing the falsity of the memo. Megan McArdle has long textual analysis of this Epson scanned doc, and she points out that it is absurdly unlikely that the Heartland group sees themselves as preventing science. rather, they would have described themselves as supporting correctly done science, or supporting teachin that restored the balance. or the like.
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