Feeling bored?

Here’s a fun activity for the afternoon. Have a look at this list of 129 supposed “experts” on climate change on the website of the notorious Heartland Institute.

Now go to our global warming denier research database the Greenpeace's ExxonSecrets and see how many of the names affiliations follow all the way back to the fossil fuel industry.

It doesn't work for everyone, but it seems about half of the names on the list are entwined in some way with the giant network of groups like the Heartland Institute that receive funding from ExxonMobil and their ilk to downplay the dangers of climate change. 

Now why would the oil industry do that?

UPDATE: I've started a List of Global Warming and Climate Change Experts for Media on DeSmogBlog, this one includes a lot of well-known scientists actively publishing in the scientific fields related to global warming and climate change.

Please drop me a line at: desmogblog@gmail.com with any additional names you would suggest.

Given the economic crisis we're in that's due in large part to the unrestricted abuse of the "free market" even the most jaded of sorts must now be more than a little wary about the expertise of the so-called "free market" think tanks that abound in the United States.

One such free-market champion, the Heartland Institute has sent out a "Journalist's Guide to Global Warming Experts" in the hopes that somehow journalists will be fooled into thinking that the list they have been provided is "the nation's leading experts on climate change and related topics."

Nation's leading experts in global warming?

It's amazing what will pass for an expert these days. Well, at least by the Heartland Institute's standards, which include:

Calvin E. Beisner, the evangelical organizer who once posed the question regarding AIDS funding:

[but] is it rational to allocate $3.5 billion dollars to fight a disease that is almost 100 percent self-inflicted by people intent on immoral and irrational behavior?"