Skeptical Science New Research for Week #20, 2021 Deep dive into shady finances of climate misinformers Skeptical Science is dedicated to combating malformed and especially fake "skepticism" about climate science, so it's hardly necessary for us to explain the relevance to our mission of a paper exploring the headwaters of misinformation and cultivated confusion. Instead we'll let the introduction of In a 2016 congressional hearing on the climate crisis, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) held up a book entitled Why Scientists Disagree About Climate Change and asked: “Who funded this phony climate science denial textbook that the Heartland Institute published and mailed to thousands of schoolteachers around the country? ... We know it costs a lot of money to print [but] we don’t know who paid for it!” (SDC 2019). The publisher of the “textbook” was the Heartland Institute, a central organization in the Climate Change Counter-Movement (CCCM). The CCCM is a complex network of organizations that functions to obstruct climate action (Brulle 2020). Senator Whitehouse’s question points to the extensive network of anonymous funders that supports the CCCM. This anonymous funding allows unaccountable, unknown entities to promote climate misinformation and obstruct climate action. Several analyses have shown that this deliberate and organized effort to misdirect and distort public discussion of climate change drives widespread misunderstanding of climate science and legislative gridlock on the issue (NRC 2011, p. 35).