The Short Hot Life of Heartland's Hateful Climate Billboard The online spin cycle on global warming has become so fast and toxic that an electronic billboard in Chicago can flash an ultra-offensive message designed to draw attention to a conference of climate contrarians, then generate a global burst of Web traffic and then be withdrawn 24 hours later as "a necessary price to make an emotional appeal to people who otherwise aren't following the climate change debate" (the statement this afternoon from the Heartland Institute, the group that paid for the messages). Hopefully that necessary price will include Heartland losing a few more of its shrinking pool of corporate contributors. The group issued a longer statement tonight on its "realist" message. If you haven't followed this exploding/imploding story carried out at the most extreme, and loudest, fringe of climate discourse, the basics were broken by Leo Hickman of The Guardian early today and then aggregated by Keith Kloor, Joe Romm, Anthony Watts, Jason Samenow and others. The episode provided a real-time teachable moment for the 50-plus environmental science and management graduate students I worked with this week at the University of California, Santa Barbara. We spent five days exploring communication challenges and opportunities related to addressing the world's entwined climate and energy challenges. In teams, the students dug in on the views and approaches of everyone from the 350.org volunteers organizing this weekend's "Connect the Dots" effort to Marc Morano, one of the most prominent professional purveyors of climate doubt. They absorbed invaluable advice from Randy "Don't Be Such a Scientist" Olson and Tom Bowman, an environment and energy communications expert, museum exhibit designer and energy-saving small business owner. You can follow some threads from our week by searching for the tag #Brenclimate on Twitter. And the students and I scratched heads and asked "what they were thinking" in considering possible goals for the Heartland Institute stunt. On that front, it's worth sharing the following exchange, snipped from a group e-mail conversation with permission, between Tom Yulsman and Keith Kloor, who are both journalists and journalism teachers: Kloor. On Twitter, Bryan Walsh said he doubted the Heartland billboard would represent the bottom, and he's undoubtedly right. Still, I think that both sides can't keep from scoring own goals... Yulsman. Repeated outrages like this marginalize whatever public forum is left for reasonable discussion of issues crucial to democracy and thereby alienate all but the hyper-partisans. Count me among the increasingly alienated. I have creeping doubts about the usefulness of my science reporting on the topic of climate change. Hmm, the really cynical side of me wonders if that's the point of it all - just to harden the opposing camps and alienate everyone else.... Climate change skeptics and people on the right are now expressing disapproval of the Heartland billboards, which is appropriate. But they are also undermining their moral stance as they claim that climate activists do the same thing. Did their mothers not tell them that claims of "Johnny did it too!!" just don't wash? It is certainly true that some activists have been equally bone-headed with their propaganda, the prime example being the notorious 10:10 "No Pressure" video featuring exploding people. But that organization has at least tried to take a different path. The Heartland Institute is supposedly taking down the billboards. But the equally despicable press release they issued when the billboards went up shows how they really feel. As for the equivalence that some are trying to draw between climate activists and skeptics, there really aren't two equal sides here. There is simply no equivalence.