UPDATE: They apparently had second thoughts. see below.
When the Heartland billboard fiasco came about last week, I pointed to this as a previous example of how both sides have made missteps. Heartland blundered with the unabomber billboard, was summarily denounced by both sides and pulled it within 24 hours.
My reader poll conducted about the issue suggests a majority (72% of 2561 respondents as of this writing) think Heartland made a blunder with the billboard ad. So do I.
It appears now that Climate Progress/Think Progress has been embarrassed enough by the attention brought to their article as a parallel example, to deep six it. Here’s the screencap I made last week.
Visiting this URL I referenced last week yields a “404 – page not found”
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/07/25/277564/norway-terrorist-is-a-global-warming-denier/
I find this development curious, especially since there’s no mention of the deletion on Think Progress/Climate Progress that I can find.
It is still available on Google Cache here:
While Heartland at least made a press release announcing they’d end the billboard, The Center for American Progress appears to have made no announcement of their removing a story linking climate skeptics to a terrorist and mass murderer. If I am wrong, and someone can find such an announcement, I’ll gladly post it as a correction.
Even so, I applaud them for doing so, but there’s no shame in telling anyone that you thought this article was too volatile to leave it in place.
h/t to WUWT reader cbrtxus
UPDATE: 5/8/12 11AM It appears the story has been restored. Second thoughts apparently, or just some sort of ploy. I checked the link several ways yesterday, and it had been removed. Many readers saw the same thing – Anthony
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One last note:
Using the search tool at the ThinkProgress site to look for “climate norway terrorist” (http://thinkprogress.org/?s=climate+norway+terrorist) now returns the scrubbed-and-now-restored article in the list of results (last night it did not), and link in the list of results still shows the original “/climate/” URL.
It still redirects to the article at the new “/security/” URL when you click on it, but for now they still haven’t quite erased all the evidence that they published that article on their ClimateProgress site.
However it’s presented, the Heartland/Climate Progress thing comes under the heading of “Please Miss, he did it too!” This false argument might pass in populist politics, but should cut no ice with scientists, or indeed anyone, trained to think logically. The warmist activists have been demonising sceptics ever since the controversy took wings, mainly because unless they keep talking very fast and loudly the people might start engaging brain. Heartland’s action has befouled the sceptic side as thoroughly as 10 10 befouled the activist side. No amount of testiculation, however well-intentioned can hide that fact. Of all committed sceptic “celebs”, Minx the Merciless was to my mind the most sure-footed in her response. While I haven’t sent back my “Fakegate” mug and T-shirt with a “Disgusted of Tonbridge Wells” note, I will pause and seriously consider any future requests for support from the Heartland Institute.
Heartland has done at least three blog posts that were equivalent to or worse than the Think Progress post. This is in addition to the billboards:
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2012/05/chance-for-anthony-watts-to-show-his.html#comments
I urge Anthony Watts to go after Heartland just as vigorously as he’s going after Think Progress.