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In what has become an annual non-event, the Heartland Institute will gather the who’s-who of the global warming denial network together in Chicago this weekend for the fourth International Conference on Climate Change. 

As in years past, the event is expected to receive very little mainstream media coverage.  The deniers like to think the reason is some liberal media conspiracy.  In reality, the lack of interest stems chiefly from the fact that this denial-a-palooza fest is dripping with oil money and represents a blatant industry effort to greenwash oil and coal while simultaneously attacking the credibility of climate scientists.

Despite the lack of press interest, the show must go on.  After all, the Chicago meet-up will provide deniers and industry front groups a chance to coordinate their ongoing efforts to smear the reputation of the IPCC, and they can reminisce about the Climategate non-scandal like boys in the schoolyard kicking around a rusty old can.

For insight into the underlying aim of the Chicago denier conference, let us take a look at the funding sources for the sponsoring organizations.

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You can often judge progress by the reaction of those opposed to it. If that’s true, we may finally be getting somewhere.

The notoriously unethical Heartland Institute is blowing a bundle of cash in an all-out effort to derail climate change legislation moving through Congress. The Heartland folks have never been overly encumbered by either ethics or accuracy and their latest effort is no exception.

Heartland is fronting three full-page ads in the Washington Post, transparently targeted at lawmakers now horse-trading over the draft American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES).

So what does that kind of action cost? According the Washington Post website, close to $250,000. But that is pocket change for Big Oil and Big Coal, who stand to lose big if US climate policy moves into the 21^st century.

The ads deadpan three hilariously audacious whoppers:

• Climate deniers lack access to the media or politicians,
• Climate scientists the world over are part of some grand conspiracy to deceive the public, and
• You should instead trust a “non-profit” organization with a budget of $5.2 million that refuses to disclose its funders.

I’ll deal with the content of the full-page propaganda effort in a separate post but the first thing to note is the desperation of the tactics.

These are sophisticated players and such ham-handed lobbying techniques are typically a last resort in the public relations toolkit. This latest move illustrates just how isolated vested oil and coal interests have become in the climate change debate.

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I’m here again at the Heartland Institute’s climate change conference in New York - or as I like to call in DenialPalooza Take 2 - and what really strikes me so far is that it’s the same people attending and talking about the same things they did last year.

I’ve been to a lot of different conferences over the years and there’s always excitement in the sharing of new studies published and hearing the lastest discoveries. After all that’s what conferences are about, a time to share and advance knowledge. You wouldn’t go to a mainstream conference one year and then go the next just to be presented the same information by the same people you heard last year.

That is, unless there’s really nothing new to share. And that appears to be the case with this year’s climate chage DenialPalooza. The schedule of speakers and the panel topics are almost a carbon copy of last year.

Take a look at the 2008 schedule and compare it to the 2009 one - same people, same topics, nothing really new.

So what’s this conference about?

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If you haven't watched Jessica Williamson and Zaproot, you really should take a second and check it out. They do a very high quality weekly environment news wrap up.

And you should really watch this week's episode, because it has a feature on yours truly and the Heartland Institute 500 story we broke the other week on DeSmog. As I mentioned to Zaproot producer Damien Somerset, there's really nothing quite like watching Jessica talk about you online!

Watch it:

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The Heartland Institute is still misrepresenting 500 scientists as "co-authors" of a paper that challenges the human role in global warming.

Although Heartland President and CEO Joseph Bast conceded on Monday that his organization had been wrong to present the scientists as people who personally and professionally doubted the proof of humankind's impact on the climate, he refused to respond to the demands from dozens of those scientists to have their names removed entirely from the web-published "paper."

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The Heartland Institute has withdrawn its claim of having identified "500 Scientists with Documented Doubts about Global Warming Scares," but is refusing the demands by dozens of those scientists to be removed from the Heartland's original offending document.

Heartland President Joseph Bast rationalizes that aside from the misleading headline, "none of the articles and news releases produced by The Heartland Institute or the Hudson Institute (the original source of the lists) claims that all of the scientists who appear in the lists currently doubt that the modern warming is man-made."