General Motors belives Climate Change 'is real'

Car giant, General Motors, has decided that Climate Change is real and has broken their 20-year relationship and support with Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based nonprofit well-known for attacking the science behind global warming and climate change.

The automaker told the Heartland Institute last week that it won't be making further donations, spokesman Greg Martin said. At a speech earlier this month, GM CEO Dan Akerson said his company is running its business under the assumption that climate change is real.

"We applaud GM's decision and the message it sends -- that it is no longer acceptable for corporations to promote the denial of climate change and that support for an organization like Heartland is not in line with GM's values," said Daniel Souweine, campaign director for Forecast the Facts, a group that urges meteorologists to talk more openly about climate change.

Internal documents leaked in February showed that the General Motors Foundation -- which the automaker runs separately from its business -- donated to the institute $15,000 in 2010 and again in 2011, with another $15,000 expected to be gifted this year.

The thinktank has long been an incubator of ideas casting doubt that the world is warming as a result of man-made pollution. In 2009 it held a conference in New York under the title "Global warming: was it ever really a crisis?"

Kert Davies, head of research for Greenpeace US that tracks the Heartland Institute, lauded the GM move. "It is a further indication that the Heartland Institute's misinformation about climate change is not something that corporations want to have anything to do with. It has become toxic."

In its response, the Heartland said that it regretted the loss of GM's support and called on liberal advocacy groups such as Greenpeace and the Huffington Post to stop "attacking scientists who question the theory of man-made global warming and corporations and foundations that are willing to fund open debate on this important public policy issue".