The fallout over the Heartland Institute's controversial, short-lived billboard campaign comparing climate change advocates with infamous terrorists, murderers and cult leaders continued over the weekend, as former partners moved to distance themselves from the skeptics' group.

A conservative and libertarian think tank said that they are going to abandon a brief but controversial advertising campaign which claimed that "the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists".

Peter Gleick, a prominent climate researcher and CEO of the Pacific Institute, admitted this week that he fraudulently obtained a collection of documents from a Chicago-based non-profit group called the Heartland Institute, which he then leaked to the media to reveal the organization’s plans to promote skepticism about anthropogenic global warming.

The Heartland Institute has sent legal notices to numerous Web sites, blogs, and publications asking them to take down the stolen and forged documents and what it views as malicious and false

The Heartland Institute, a Libertarian thinktank that questions current climate science, has inadvertently revealed who funded their operations.