Well, the DeSmog Blog “coup” is going down, oh the humanity.
There’s a scathing second writeup at The Atlantic by Megan McArdle (as if the first wasn’t enough) that takes the DeSmoggers to task. Note to Hoggan and crew – when you can’t even get a left leaning news outlet to back you up, even in the slightest, you’ve lost the battle.
This is a must read: Heartland Memo Looking Faker By the Minute
I appreciate this quote from her article:
The high probability that the memo is fake makes this response from Desmogblog, one of the first places to post the memos, all the more disappointing:
The DeSmogBlog has no evidence supporting Heartland’s claim that the Strategic document is fake. A close review of the content shows that it is overwhelmingly accurate (“almost too accurate” for one analyst), and while critics have said that it is “too short” or is distinguished by “an overuse of commas,” even the skeptics at weatherguy Anthony Watts’s WUWT say that a technical analysis of the metadata on the documents in question does not offer sufficient information to come to a firm conclusion either way.But in the tradition of the famous, and famously controversial “hockey stick graph,” the challenge to the single document has afforded the DeSmogBlog’s critics – and Heartland’s supporters – something comfortable to obsess about while they avoid answering questions raised by the other documents.
The first two links are to my post, and they are an egregious misrepresentation of what I said.
She adds:
Dismissing the possibility of fakery–and the obvious questions about who might have perpetrated it–does not help us focus on the “real issues”. I’m afraid “Fake but accurate” just won’t do. Nor will trying to shift the burden of proof to the people who are pointing out solid reasons for concern. Instead, the stubborn willingness to ignore obvious problems becomes the story–something that Dan Rather learned to his dismay in 2004.
Moreover, the fact is that this document does not merely confirm facts found in other sources. It substantially recasts those facts, in the case of the Koch donation. And in the selection of facts it presents, and the spin it puts on them, it alters the reporting.
…
The climate blogs presumably relied so heavily on the memo because the quotes were punchier, and suggested far darker motivations than the blandly professional language of the authenticated documents–and because it edited the facts into a neat, almost narrative story.
In the first 24 hours, I saw a lot of comments along the line of “See! They’re really just as amoral and dangerous as we thought they were!” based on a memo which I now believe to have been written by someone who, well, thinks that AGW skeptics are amoral and dangerous. (And judging from his update to the original document dump, Littlemore’s fellow blogger, Brandon Demelle, is also unsure of the memo’s “facts”.)
=============================================================
Crash and burn for DeSmog.
Meanwhile, over at The American Spectator, Ross Kaminsky has this:
=============================================================
Theft and Apparent Forgery of Heartland Institute Documents
The Heartland Institute is in contact with law enforcement officials, which may have the perpetrator feeling a little nervous.
One obvious suspect in the Heartland document theft — and this is just my speculation — is Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security and a true enemy of the Heartland Institute. Gleick is a committed alarmist rent-seeker who seems quite bitter that he shares Forbes magazine’s pages with Heartland’s James Taylor.
The document which the alarmists have been trying to make the most of is called “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy.” It appears to be of a similar nature to the forged “Rathergate” documents which ended Dan Rather’s long career promoting leftist views disguised as news.
First, the Heartland document is written in a way which makes it appear unlikely to be genuine. As a commenter on a Forbes.com article about this mini-scandal notes, “It uses the term ‘anti-climate’ to refer to Heartland’s own position — a derogatory term which climate skeptic outfits never use to describe their positions (and…) it is written in the first person, yet there’s no indication of who wrote it. (Have you ever seen a memo like that?)”
…
Interestingly, Gleick, who would normally be preening and prancing in glee at this sort of attention to the Heartland Institute has so far been utterly silent at his Forbes blog and on his Twitter feed.
Full story here.
================================================================
(Added)There are two other discussions of interest in the “whodunnit” category. Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has a spirited discussion going on (love his movie graphic), as does Lucia’s Blackboard. Pielke Jr. has flat out asked Dr. Gleick in an email if he was involved, and so have I. I have received no response since my email this morning, and to my knowledge neither has Pielke Jr. For once, not a sound out of WaterWorld by the bay.
In Australia, The Age has this political cartoon about Dr. Bob Carter, also named in the emails along with me:
We live in interesting times. Popcorn futures are off the charts.
I’m enjoying a holiday in my home country at the moment and singing to myself the old Scottish standard: “Oh! We’ll take the high road…”.
It’s all so sadly incompetant, I’m beginning to think that some naughty person walked them into a data mine.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/fakegate/
Pointman
Finger wagging about social engineering and forged documents? Apparently, McArdle hates science.
It feels like something just shifted.
Questions I would ask are:
“have any of Heartland’s laptops gone missing recently or been sold as scrap?”
Someone apparently had access to those real documents, or had access to the computer of someone who did. Often disk drives of old computers can show up on eBay or other outlets with the original data intact. Did they throw away an old drive that someone plucked out of the trash? Someone maybe lift a thumb drive? There could have been any number of ways those documents might have found their way out but the first thing I would look for are the obvious:
Someone sharing a wifi access point in the office with no access control that gives access to internal document directories on a file server.
Lost of stolen laptop.
Lack of security for information thrown away.
Lack of security for hardware thrown away.
Someone with malware on their computer or phone(!) that might allow access to their email/attachments, etc.
I think that one’s position should be that pure weather, undiluted by climate, would be too variable to sustain a robust economy, so we should be pro, not anti-climate.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4zp2NucwsU]
Thanks for reproducing The Age cartoon! It’s delightful, and apt. That Flannery, a museum biologist, is being paid a fortune to pontificate about something of which he is totally ignorant. It’s time he was taken down.
You left the ‘n’ off the end of Megan’s name in the line just below the image. Seems to imply large. I doubt she would be pleased. 🙂
Anthony I have ready your blog since 2008 and always appreciate your candor. You are allowed to crow since you have put up with such venom for so long.
I posted this on Bishop Hill earlier but thought it might do well with this post.
So in a nutshell.
The fake memo is just another document with tortured, and made up data that is passed off as official and if we call it as we see it we are anti-science. These warmers are so used to “adjusting” data and “smoothing” trends and using “forcings”….heck this 2012 Climate strategy is another official warmer computer model to create a report!!
Think about it. They take information ( HI donor data ) create smoothing ( outline for Climate Strategy ) use forcings ( predetermined motives of HI ) mix in some Dr Evil stuff ( not teaching science in schools ) and Bam! the 2012 Climate Strategy that is real in their minds. Who could argue? I mean all they did was embellish what they already knew was true.
And if we point out that it is fake they will say the data is there for everyone to see. When we shine the light of truth on the document we are obviously support big oil, the Koch Foundation, take candy from baby’s, want the world to start of fire…..blah blah blah.
We should give the fake memo a name and use it as the Posterchild for the warmers.
Lol. And credit to Steven Mosher, who seems to have first suggested Gleick as a culprit based on timezones and punctuation.
Dr, Pielke Jr. has a tweet: “I emailed @PeterGleick to ask if he faked the Heartland document, no reply yet. I offered to publish his confirmation or denial on my blog.” [From Lucia.]
Baited breath….
Odd, “no reply yet”. He was so fast in doing an Amazon review of Donna’s book on the IPCC he practically gave off Cherenkov radiation!
On page A4 of the Vancouver Sun, Postmedia “science” reporter Margaret Munro authors one article and is quoted in another. In said article she interviews AAAS president Nina Federoff about why mainstream climate science is losing the debate. The article is so blatently misleading it deserves wide exposure to highlight how corrupt and intellectually and morally deficient the MSM has become. Someone(more computer literate than I) should post the article in its entirety so that Margaret, and willing dupe the Sun, can be properly shamed.
The Age did that cartoon? You’re kidding right? That paper is so green left that the weekly supplement is actually called “The Green Guide!”
“High-Profile” enough for you now Mr Gleick?
It’s hard to believe that Peter Gleick had anything to do with writing the “Confidential” memo, because the grammar and syntax are so awkward. That memo is written at about a mediocre 12th grade level.
Peter Gleick, no mater his AGW outlook, is a highly intelligent and well-educated guy. He’s also president of the Pacific Institute, and so must be entirely conversant with memo-ese. Anything he writes will surely be professional in style and presentation, quite apart from content validity.
I’d surmise he had nothing to do with it. If it was offered to him prior to distribution, I’d expect he’d immediately nix it because its obviously shallow and unprofessional style would be a dead give-away.
Consider this analysis a hypothesis. We may soon find out who did it, and I could be wrong. That would be a surprise, though, to me anyway.
Bated, too.
__
I’d noted the use of warmist cant in document, but missed that “anti-climate” phrase. That’s a very telling tell! No skeptic would use that, EVAH!
Done like dinner.
r.murphy says:
February 17, 2012 at 5:55 pm
The article is so blatantly misleading it deserves wide exposure
Here it can be accessed from the Edmonton Journal.
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/technology/Climate+change+naysayers+drowning+science+expert/6167818/story.html
One quote:
“I am very worried,” Federoff told reporters. She noted that surveys indicate the number of Americans who believe in climate change has been declining “even as the scientific consensus (on climate change) has in-creased.”
Amateurs.
This is trench warfare.
Okay which of you smart alec deniers did this? Knowing it would get published and spread quickly without any fact checking only to get shot down in embarassing flames. You are good. Real good. I never want to play cards with you.
Cheers
Wow, you guys sure got the media attention, but NOT the attention you wanted…
And to add to the hoopla, Mann has a very supportive review in the Guardian:
“The inside story on climate scientists under siege
Michael Mann reveals his account of attacks by entrenched interests seeking to undermine his ‘hockey stick’ graph……
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/17/michael-mann-climate-war
You should have a hanky nearby when you read it.
Crosspatch,
According to Heartland they are very much aware of how the documents were obtained by this “person of interest.” A staffer at Heartland was duped into sending the files out, via email attachment, to a new email address. This person who fooled the Heartland staffer into sending the documents claimed to be on the executive committee or a director or something like that.
My guess is that the investigation into this will go rather well. There are many leads to follow up on. One can also ID the exact scanner which was used to scan in the fake documents. There are many ways of doing this.
Identical to Rather-Gate, the person scanned in the document to eliminate the meta data which is embedded in all electronic documents. But that just gives investigators other metadata to follow which is less apparent to the average user.
Some scientists might be fairly smart in specific areas, but totally oblivious to the very detailed electronic crumb trail we all leave behind.
Cheers!
Some people really think life is like the movies. In this case, evil schemers at Heartland let slip a secret document where they confess to exactly what their opponents accuse them of.
It’s like they imagined Dr. Evil leaving his webcam on during a meeting, and thought “yeah, that seems plausible.”
On the other hand, there is precedent for such inane behavior – see Journ-o-list. Of course, they largely got away with it.
cui bono says-
“He was so fast in doing an Amazon review of Donna’s book on the IPCC he practically gave off Cherenkov radiation!”
Excellent!
🙂
I feel a great disturbance in the farce!
Larry
From the DeSmog response:
“a supposed statistical flaw in Michael Mann’s excellent and prescient work”
That’s so disturbing I’m speachless.
Mr Gleick is hiding under his desk behind a double-locked door with a chair propped under the knob. His scanner is in a dumpster half-way across town. His shredder is burned out because he tried to put his laptop through it.
So. The other documents, and their contents are accurate?
Is the argument here actually that because you think this one is fake, therefore the other information is inadmissable?
Are you actually all now arguing that your arguments in favour of leaking emails don’t apply if it’s done to people you support?
Interesting to see Ross Kaminsky bring up Rathergate in his article. Charles Johnson at Littlegreenfootballs (who helped expose the Rathergate memos) posted commentary on his website recently titled: “Denialgate: Heartland Institute Mistakenly Emailed Internal Documents”. Haven’t seen him follow up with a correction.
Anthony, you should start a grassroots fund to sue DeSh*tBlog and TheGurdian(of lies) and the Biased Brodcast Channel (BBC) under libel laws just like Dr. Tim Balls defence fund.
Here is an excellent list of “clues” from Megan McArdle’s The Atlantic story:
“For me, this leaves the most fascinating question of all: who wrote it? We have a few clues:
1) They are on the west coast
2) They own or have access to an Epson scanner–though God knows, this could be at a Kinkos.
3) They probably themselves have a somewhat run-on writing style
4) I’m guessing they use the word “high-profile” a fair amount.
5) They are bizarrely obsessed with global warming coverage at Forbes, which suggests to me that there is a good chance that they write or comment on the website, or that they have tangled with writers at Forbes (probably Taylor) either in public or private.
6) The last paragraph is the biggest departure from the source documents, and is therefore likely to be closest to the author’s own style.
7) I have a strong suspicion that they refrained from commenting on the document dump. That’s what I’d do, anyway. A commenter or email correspondent who suddenly disappeared when they normally would have been reveling in this sort of story is a good candidate.
8) They seem to have it in for Andy Revkin at the New York Times. There’s nothing in the other documents to indicate that Heartland thinks Revkin is amenable to being . . . turned? I’m not sure what the right word is, but the implication in the strategy memo that Heartland believes it could somehow develop a relationship with Revkin seems aimed at discrediting Revkin’s work.”
What other clues can be obtained from the evidence at hand???
Marcus McSpartacus,
You need to get up to speed, boy. The other documents were already publicly available. The sole issue is the single fabricated document.
“Gleick-n-spiel”
I think it is in for a bit of a beating now the world wide web orchestra of the people has warmed up.
“Marcus McSpartacus says:
February 17, 2012 at 7:00 pm
So. The other documents, and their contents are accurate?
Is the argument here actually that because you think this one is fake, therefore the other information is inadmissable?”
For the moment we should not assume any of the docs are completely legit. They could have easily “adjusted” some data on the other docs as well.
“Are you actually all now arguing that your arguments in favour of leaking emails don’t apply if it’s done to people you support?”
This is a completely retarded argument…. let me count the ways.
1. The heartland group is a private group.
The CRU/etc ILLEGALLY… let me type that again for you ILLEGALLY withheld public information they where legally required to give out to people when asked.
2. The heartland group had they’re info stolen from them via fraud.
The CRU/etc hand they’re info exposed by a whistler blower.
3. The info is the heartland doc drop outside of the fake doc contain NOTHING that is criminal in nature or even interesting.
The CRU/etc doc drop CLEARLY has CRIMINAL activity displayed in it among other things.
However delicious it would be if a Certain Person did in fact turn out to be the perpetrator, I suggest that names and accusations be curtailed for now. At least until after any investigation discovers the miscreant for definite.
Remember people, innocent until proven guilty – not the other way around.
Regards.
Marcus McSpartacus says:
February 17, 2012 at 7:00 pm
Rather put another way, we could invent a few really juicy, embarrassing emails and add them to the Climategate I and II sets, except for one little problem:
The originals were so bad nothing more damning could have been added.
The bizarre sourcewatch site has added a references to the “leaked” documents on their Heartland page – http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute – the info was added on Feb 16th
Interestingly they choose to quote from the strategy document,- Desmog is their reference, see footnote 18 – despite them knowing Heartland stated the strategy document was faked. They say this about our host:
funding climate change deniers Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 a month), James Taylor who has written a lot about Climategate through his Forbes blog, and Anthony Watts ($90,000 for 2012) to challenge “warmist science essays that counter our own,” including funding “external networks (such as WUWT [Watts Up With That?] and other groups capable of rapidly mobilizing responses to new scientific findings, news stories, or unfavorable blog posts).”[18]
The Protocols of the Elders of the Heartland Institute, lol!
Sourcewatch also said this (I think on Feb 15th) about Mr Watts – http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Anthony_Watts#cite_note-0 – note the last sentence, the History said they added a reference to “paid denialism” on the page on Feb 15th:-
Willard Anthony Watts (Anthony Watts) is a blogger, weathercaster and non-scientist, paid AGW denier who runs the website wattsupwiththat.com. He does not have a university qualification and has no climate credentials other than being a radio weather announcer. His website is parodied and debunked at the website wottsupwiththat.com Watts is on the payroll of the Heartland Institute, which itself is funded by polluting industries.[1]
I just had a thought. Even though the person deleted the email account…if the documents were emailed from an HI computer then it would be nothing to find who they sent them to..( sent items folder in case some warmers are reading this) And..they could produce a copy of the email and the attachments.
It should also be noted that if the receiving party deletes the email account a record of it being created will be in the domain archives and should be nothing to find the destination IP. Even if it’s gmail or hotmail whatever computer accessed that account via the web will be known.
So as Desmog and others get huffy and try to redirect the topic they will soon feel the pressure. I can’t believe this person would do it this way. IT’S SOOOO STUPID.
The angle Desmog is using is that the information was GIVEN out by an insider. So again they would have a log of the information coming from the inside and the destination and the attachments.
So whoever did this is playing a game of chicken right now. While we have been disecting the author and the timeline and metadata the warmers have been trying to get everyone to focus on the content and play ” how does it feel” games and hope they bide time till the lawyers come kocking.
Several have noted the rapidity which which DeSmog published the “reports” once they obtained them . . . .within an hour.
Now why do you think that was? Do you think some person they didn’t know from Adam — like perhaps Lucy Ramirez from Texas — would have been able to slip them the documents and DeSmog put it on their website as fast as their hot little fingers could enter the documents — essentially not even taking the time to read them?
Or do you suppose that they were put on their site — because the person that provided it to them was quite well known to them and trusted?
Ooops!! I get feeling that Amazons most diligent reviewer may have just overplayed his hand.
On a side note,
“Popcorn futures are off the charts.”
I love the way our language throws up these little gems which only a few years ago would have been impossibly cryptic.
I find the political discussion to be surreal. The extreme AGW paradigm supporters propose that we waste trillions of dollars on boondoggle proposals that will have no significant impact on atmospheric CO2 increases (This is another aspect of skepticism. Boondoggle proposals are boondoggle proposals, even when one truly believes in the fairy tale. i.e. Stupid ideas that waste tax payer funds are not the correct approach even if the extreme AGW paradigm was scientifically correct.
The biosphere has expanded and will expand due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from 280 ppm to 560 ppm over the next 100 years. The small increase in planetary temperature as a result of this increase, most of which will be at high latitudes, will increase the growing season and extent of the biosphere into the tundra and Arctic regions. The CO2 increase and resulting warming (less than 1C in response to a doubling from 0.028% t0 0.054%) will be unequivocally beneficial to the biosphere and to humans. The reason the that there will be a small increase in planetary temperature due a doubling of atmospheric CO2 is that planetary cloud cover in the tropics increases or decreases to resist forcing changes, thereby reflecting more or less solar short wave radiation off into space.
The skeptics are scientifically correct. Doubling of atmospheric CO2 is beneficial, not an environmental crisis.
The irony is it appears there is currently an abrupt solar change underway. (The sun was at its highest and longest high solar activity period in 10,000 years, prior to the current abrupt solar magnetic cycle change (see the link to Livingston and Penn’s paper attached below) that is now underway. In the past, when this specific solar cycle change occurred, high cycle and long period at high cycle, followed by an abrupt stoppage of the solar magnetic cycle, there was a Dansgaard-Oeschger event (23 Dansgaard-Oeschger events have been tracked all following a cycle of roughly 1470 years), or a Heinrich event (the Heinrich events occur at the predicted time of the Dansgaard-Oescheger events and hence appear to be large and amplified Dansgaard_Oescherger events), or the termination of the interglacial periods.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
http://www.climate4you.com/images/VostokTemp0-420000%20BP.gif
In the paleoclimatic record there are is a cyclic series of significant climate changes that have a roughly 1470 year pattern, “Dansgaard-Oeschger events”. Roughly ever 10,000 years to 8000 years the significant climate changes are very, very, rapid, very large climatic changes.
The lesson of the past, in terms of what is in the climate record is there is a tremendously strong cyclic climate change forcing mechanism that is capable of initiating and terminating interglacial periods. That is an observational fact. There has been 23 interglacial/glacial cycles. The interglacial periods are now roughly 10,000 years long. The glacial periods are now 100,000 years long. The past interglacial periods have ended abruptly and have ended abruptly when there is a orbital configuration that matches the current orbital configuration and when there has been an abrupt change to sun. (There are cosmogenic isotope changes at the 1470 year events and there are cosmogenic isotope changes at the Heinrich abrupt interglacial terminating type of climate change events.)
That is the observational evidence. The analysis has discarded, disproved, Milankovitch’s theory that somehow insolation changes which result in colder or warmer summers at 60N (we are in the insolation period now where interglacial periods terminate) can explain the glacial/interglacial cycle. The forcing change due to insolation is roughly 1/200 of what is required to explain the observed abrupt change.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.0784v1
Long-term Evolution of Sunspot Magnetic Fields
Independent of the normal solar cycle, a decrease in the sunspot magnetic field strength has been observed using the Zeeman-split 1564.8nm Fe I spectral line at the NSO Kitt Peak McMath-Pierce telescope. Corresponding changes in sunspot brightness and the strength of molecular absorption lines were also seen. This trend was seen to continue in observations of the first sunspots of the new solar Cycle 24, and extrapolating a linear fit to this trend would lead to only half the number of spots in Cycle 24 compared to Cycle 23, and imply virtually no sunspots in Cycle 25.
The following is a list of five paradoxes associated with Milankovitch’s theory. (Typically one or two paradoxes will result in a theory being discharged or a major revision.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
100,000-year problem
Main article: 100,000-year problem
The 100,000-year problem is that the eccentricity variations have a significantly smaller impact on solar forcing than precession or obliquity and hence might be expected to produce the weakest effects. The greatest observed response is at the 100,000-year timescale, while the theoretical forcing is smaller at this scale, in regard to the ice ages.[10] However, observations show that during the last 1 million years, the strongest climate signal is the 100,000-year cycle. In addition, despite the relatively great 100,000-year cycle, some have argued that the length of the climate record is insufficient to establish a statistically significant relationship between climate and eccentricity variations.[11] Various explanations for this discrepancy have been proposed, including frequency modulation[12] or various feedbacks (from carbon dioxide, cosmic rays, or from ice sheet dynamics). Some models can reproduce the 100,000 year cycles as a result of non-linear interactions between small changes in the Earth’s orbit and internal oscillations of the climate system.[13][14]
400,000-year problem
The 400,000-year problem is that the eccentricity variations have a strong 400,000-year cycle. That cycle is only clearly present in climate records older than the last million years. If the 100ka variations are having such a strong effect, the 400ka variations might also be expected to be apparent. This is also known as the stage 11 problem, after the interglacial in marine isotopic stage 11 which would be unexpected if the 400,000-year cycle has an impact on climate. The relative absence of this periodicity in the marine isotopic record may be due, at least in part, to the response times of the climate system components involved—in particular, the carbon cycle.
Stage 5 problem
The stage 5 problem refers to the timing of the penultimate interglacial (in marine isotopic stage 5) which appears to have begun ten thousand years in advance of the solar forcing hypothesized to have caused it (the causality problem).
[edit] Effect exceeds cause
See also: Climate change feedback
420,000 years of ice core data from Vostok, Antarctica research station.
The effects of these variations are primarily believed to be due to variations in the intensity of solar radiation upon various parts of the globe. Observations show climate behavior is much more intense than the calculated variations. Various internal characteristics of climate systems are believed to be sensitive to the insolation changes, causing amplification (positive feedback) and damping responses (negative feedback).
The unsplit peak problem
The unsplit peak problem refers to the fact that eccentricity has cleanly resolved variations at both the 95 and 125ka periods. A sufficiently long, well-dated record of climate change should be able to resolve both frequencies,[15] but some researchers interpret climate records of the last million years as showing only a single spectral peak at 100ka periodicity. It is debatable whether the quality of existing data ought to be sufficient to resolve both frequencies over the last million years.
The transition problem
Variations of Cycle Times, curves determined from ocean sediments
The transition problem refers to the switch in the frequency of climate variations 1 million years ago. From 1–3 million years, climate had a dominant mode matching the 41ka cycle in obliquity. After 1 million years ago, this switched to a 100ka variation matching eccentricity, for which no reason has been established.
[edit] Identifying dominant factor
Milankovitch believed that decreased summer insolation in northern high latitudes was the dominant factor leading to glaciation, which led him to (incorrectly) deduce an approximate 41ka period for ice ages.[16] Subsequent research has shown that the 100ka eccentricity cycle is more important, resulting in 100,000-year ice age cycles of the Quaternary glaciation over the last few million years.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2000PA000571.shtml
On the 1470-year pacing of Dansgaard-Oeschger warm events
The oxygen isotope record from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice core was reanalyzed in the frequency and time domains. The prominent 1470-year spectral peak, which has been associated with the occurrence of Dansgaard-Oeschger interstadial events, is solely caused by Dansgaard-Oeschger events 5, 6, and 7. This result emphasizes the nonstationary character of the oxygen isotope time series. Nevertheless, a fundamental pacing period of ∼1470 years seems to control the timing of the onset of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. A trapezoidal time series model is introduced which provides a template for the pacing of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Statistical analysis indicates only a ≤3% probability that the number of matches between observed and template-derived onsets of Dansgaard-Oeschger events between 13 and 46 kyr B.P. resulted by chance. During this interval the spacing of the Dansgaard-Oeschger onsets varied by ±20% around the fundamental 1470-year period and multiples thereof. The pacing seems unaffected by variations in the strength of North Atlantic Deep Water formation, suggesting that the thermohaline circulation was not the primary controlling factor of the pacing period.
http://nsidc.org/news/press/day_after/NRCabruptcc.pdf
Until the 1990s, the dominant view of climate change was that Earth’s climate system has changed gradually in response to both natural and human-induced processes. Evidence pieced together over the last few decades, however, shows that climate has changed much more rapidly—sometimes abruptly— in the past and therefore could do so again in the future.
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html
According to the marine records, the Eemian interglacial ended with a rapid cooling event about 110,000 years ago (e.g., Imbrie et al., 1984; Martinson et al., 1987), which also shows up in ice cores and pollen records from across Eurasia. From a relatively high resolution core in the North Atlantic. Adkins et al. (1997) suggested that the final cooling event took less than 400 years, and it might have been much more rapid.
The event at 8200 ka is the most striking sudden cooling event during the Holocene, giving widespread cool, dry conditions lasting perhaps 200 years before a rapid return to climates warmer and generally moister than the present. This event is clearly detectable in the Greenland ice cores, where the cooling seems to have been about half-way as severe as the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene difference (Alley et al., 1997; Mayewski et al., 1997). No detailed assessment of the speed of change involved seems to have been made within the literature (though it should be possible to make such assessments from the ice core record), but the short duration of these events at least suggests changes that took only a few decades or less to occur.
The Younger Dryas cold event at about 12,900-11,500 years ago seems to have had the general features of a Heinrich Event, and may in fact be regarded as the most recent of these (Severinghaus et al. 1998). The sudden onset and ending of the Younger Dryas has been studied in particular detail in the ice core and sediment records on land and in the sea (e.g., Bjoerck et al., 1996), and it might be representative of other Heinrich events.
No one could have mistaken the Smog Blog for a reputable source of information before all this, but they have now disgraced themselves beyond all recognition.
Good thing they are “PR experts” because they are going to be spending a lot of time trying to delude people that anything they ever say should be noticed.
Smokey says:
February 17, 2012 at 7:08 pm
Marcus McSpartacus,
You need to get up to speed, boy. The other documents were already publicly available. The sole issue is the single fabricated document.
Somehow I missed that. Thanks, Smokey.
It occurs to me that an auditable copy of the email sent out could probably be recovered … and found to be missing the faked document! Similarly, there’s probably a copy on the receiver’s ISP servers. IOW, it should be possible to show the fake was never sent out.
Since this has backfired so badly, could it be that the infamous Anonymous Donor and the much-hunted Heartland Criminal are in fact one and the same? This publicity for Heartland would more than make up for his decreasing donations.
The twist in the last scene of the detective movie. Cue music, roll credits.
>Or do you suppose that they were put on their site — because the person that provided it to them was quite well known to them and trusted?
That’s pretty funny…. They either put stuff up because they knew the source – or because they didn’t check an anonymous source. Neither looks good.
But…
They actually said in an interview they got it from an anonymous source and published within 1 hour — they’re actually proud of that! See their comments to politico – http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=5826D160-4705-4D72-A0BB-44C8C2EDA7DC
Also the message anonymous email was sent to about 15 different parties, including desmog, all at the same time – see http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2012/02/header-from-leakers-email.html .
So it really does seem Desmog was just the quickest to react to the anonymous source.
“Marcus McSpartacus says:
February 17, 2012 at 7:00 pm
So. The other documents, and their contents are accurate?
Is the argument here actually that because you think this one is fake, therefore the other information is inadmissable? ”
Nope that isn’t the argument. It is the argument being made by the warmista’s but not by the skeptics.
Basically the other documents don’t have anything juicy or exciting in them. Nothing appalling or terrible or shocking. Just an private group funding things privately. Not exactly shocking stuff.
That appears to have been the problem there was nothing sexy in the Heartland document dump so someone sexed it up by creating the fake memo. Much of the stuff in the fake comes from the other documents more or less though even there the faker couldn’t leave reality alone and tried to sex things up by rounding numbers up.
No the real problem with the whole thing is that the Fake document is the only source for the gotcha money quotes. It editorializes but kind of like a bad bond villain would editorialize not like anything you would see a skeptic publish.
That is the point.
Like Pat Frank, I will be very surprised if it’s Gleick.
I read Megan’s column everyday (along with the many posts on WUWT). Megan is not a liberal, though she needs education about the warmistas and their evil deeds.
Brian,
That is exactly where I was going with that. I mean, HI will be able to prove where the documents were sent and WHAT was sent. Then it get’s fun because we will know shortly who they were sent to and then we get to take their computer and search their harddive……Tall Bloke must be salivating…..
Dittos on what Kevin Cave said. Until it is known who did it, we don’t know who did it, and we shouldn’t be blaming individuals who might very well be innocent. That goes even for those who decline to issue denials they know very well might not be believed anyway.
Well let this be a lesson to them. Maybe from here on in they will be more critical, and dare I say it….. Skeptical.
Maybe this was the lesson they needed in order to understand how easy it is to be decieved when slavishly attached to unquestioning idealism and how rotten apples can ruin a whole barrel.
You know it’s coming. There will be a Fakegate II. Possibly a “Beneath the Planet of Fakegate, the Sequel”. Science is the big loser in this, and the parade of Fan Boy posts on both sides is a grand disappointment. I’d hate to see the climate debate dominated by hissyfit cross posts between adversarial blogs but that seems to be where it’s going. This tit for tat flapping is worse than reading Joshua’s blog hosted by Judy Curry at Climate Etc.
This cliche says it all: “Somebody is wrong on the internet!” That seems to bring out the worst.
If you are not looking for that evidence the chances of this statement being and remaining true approaches 100%. The claim is pathological. To paraphrase Churchill, “I shall waste no time rushing to desmogblog to read the rest of this story”.
In the “Confidential 2012” document, a key sentence sentence reads:
“This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out. ”
(referring to the Forbes blogs and keeping warmist scientist writers out)
No one in the sceptic community believes they are anti-climate. So why would Heartland write that about themselves? It is a very bizarre and distinct turn of phrase.
Now that it has been exposed as a fraud, it makes sense that someone from the warmist camp would write this way. It is especially revealing that they see sceptics as very twisted people who are against science.
FWIW, Peter Gleick uses the term “anti-science” or “anti-climate” over 20 times on his Forbes.com BLOG. Of course there is no connection, but the term “anti-climate” is not common.
Unlike FOIA, I suspect we will soon learn the identity of whomever was behind the creation of the fake document.
LOL… at the AGE cartoon of PM Gillard roasting our resident flim flam man and head of Australia’s Climate Change Commission, Tim Flannery. That guy has not got a single prediction right. He was the guy that said that Perth would be the first “Ghost City” as its water supply dried up. He also predicted that Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide would all run out of water because the dams would dry up and even the rain if it did fall, wouldn’t reach the dams because the soil would be so dry……. Since then we’ve had floods of biblical proportions and mate!…. that damn soil sure ain’t dry anymore.
I feel so bad for the site funded by a convicted money launderer,
The Truth about DeSmogBlog
“DeSmogBlog is a smear site founded by a scientifically unqualified public relations man, James Hoggan and [b]funded by a convicted money launderer, John Lefebvre.[/b] The irony here is their favorite tactic is to attempt to smear those they disagree with as funded by “dirty money”. Since it’s creation in 2006 the site has done nothing but post poorly researched propaganda with a clear intent to smear respected scientists, policy analysts or groups who dare oppose an alarmist position on global warming. Their articles frequently reference unreliable sources such as Wikipedia and Sourcewatch since they are unable to find any fact based criticisms of those they criticize in respected news sources.”
http://www.populartechnology.net/2011/04/truth-about-desmogblog.html
Copner says:
February 17, 2012 at 8:15 pm
And with DeSmog blog’s drooping numbers, is it a wonder they were the first (of 15 recipients) to run with the red meat through the junk yard? Perhaps not.
Copner says:
February 17, 2012 at 8:15 pm
“So it really does seem Desmog was just the quickest to react to the anonymous source.”
====================
Given, that the speed of retort supersedes known accuracy.
Solutions obtained should be used with caution.
Amy Ridenour says:
February 17, 2012 at 8:54 pm
Nobody HAS been blamed. But SOMEONE did this thing — and SPECULATION is free, LEGAL, and could be quite useful.
I’ve always had, er, a problem with unilateral disarmament.
My only hope is that this goes to the courts for the publicity, and just maybe the public will get a good educational show about whats going on. That is if the Green mafia do not get in the way.
Since everybody’s already weighed in, better than I could, on the matter at hand, I feel free to turn to something as small as a matter of taste. Anthony, I love your blog and read it almost daily, and have urged my fellow skeptics to check it out on frequent occasions. That said, I’m a bit squeamish about the use of the image of the Hindenburg accident for something like this post. I forget how many people died in that horrible accident—seems like two or three dozen souls—but it seems to me a photo of an event in which even one person died isn’t the best choice for highlighting the “crash and burn” of something as ultimately superficial as this. A Vanguard test crashing on the pad or something like that seems just as illustrative without cheapening an event in which people died. I assume I’ll catch flak for being oversensitive when it comes to a fight against people who want to relegate humans to second-class citizens on the planet Earth. I appreciate the argument, but it’s one of those instances where I feel like if I we can get talked past that basic level of sensitivity, then we’ve already lost something worth saving. As you were.
For those interested in examining circumstantial evidence that may point in the direction of the forger of the fraudulent memo, wander on over to Lucia’s and check the comments, particularly for Mosher. It’s Mosh who gets the credit for putting the pieces together on this speculation. I’ll admit I find the ‘consilience’ of evidence to be pretty compelling, though certainly not yet conclusive. The big evidence is the usage in the document of rather rare terms and some quite odd punctuation that are mirrored in the writings of a certain individual. There are also many little pieces of circumstantial evidence all pointing in one direction and, so far, none countering the thesis Mosh has put forward.
Some have pointed out that this odd punctuation isn’t “unicorn” rare and also that searches reveal the unusual terms have occasionally been used by a few others prior to the document’s release. However, let’s consider each bit of evidence as if they were overlapping circles on a Venn diagram each containing potential suspects. The circles may be large enough to remain only circumstantial when considered individually but the area where they all overlap starts getting quite small.
Circle 1: Those with a certain set of odd punctuation habits.
Circle 2: Those who use a couple of quite rare pro-CAGW terms.
Circle 3: Those who don’t like Judith Curry.
Circle 4: Those who also don’t like Andy Revkin (most CAGW proponents generally view Revkin as a supporter).
Circle 5: Those who think that Forbes’ blogs would be an area of focus or concern to Heartland. (In reality, Forbes blogs are a peripheral backwater in the debate at best).
Circle 6: Those who believe that Peter Gleick is a high profile climate scientist. (In reality, this is not a widely held belief in either camp).
Circle 7: Those who believe that Heartland sees Forbes and Gleick as significant enough to prominently call out by name in such a memo, bypassing a huge number of far more notable and effective pro-CAGW media outlets and warmists.
Circle 8: Those previously aware of, and in possession of, Heartland’s Form 990 (seems like a pretty big circle because it’s available publicly on the web if you go looking and know where to look. However, I don’t have it and had never heard of it. How about you?).
Circle 9: Those who previously studied Heartland’s Form 990 and believe it contains information that could be damaging to Heartland (it doesn’t but apparently a small handful of activists previously focused on it kind of obsessively).
Circle 10: Those who find the idea of Heartland supporting the teaching of balanced climate science in schools to be very, very bad (this was the area of farthest ‘reach’ in the document IMHO, so it appears to be a hot button with our fraudulent forger).
Circle 11: Those who live in the Pacific time zone (based on metadata in the file).
Circle 12: Those who is a deeply committed pro-CAGW activist.
Circle 13: Those who have a particular axe to grind with the Heartland Institute. Perhaps with a special focus one or more senior staffers at Heartland (the memo appears to be written from the perspective of such a staffer, thus is an attack on both Heartland and such staffer(s)).
Circle 14: Those so entrenched in the pro-CAGW echo chamber that they believe Heartland staffers might write a memo with such ludricous ‘villianous cackling’ (to quote The Atlantic). They even think others will believe it and, I suspect, they believe that Heartland staffers actually talk in private to each other in ways that imply Heartland’s actions are underhanded. This person doesn’t just think Heartland is wrong, they think Heartland is actually EVIL and that Heartland senior staffers must know it. This is someone with their head way, way down the rabbit hole.
Circle 15: Those who believe in the CAGW cause so ferverently they are willing to lie to support their cause. This may not be the first time this person has decieved the public to sway opinion against those opposing the CAGW cause.
Circle 16: Those who began laying low immediately after the release of the forgery.
Any one of those 16 circles is pretty big but the overlap of all of them is quite tiny. Tiny enough to hold just a single fraudelent forger? I don’t know. There is at least one person who some believe appears to stand right in the exact spot where every one of those circles overlap. However this is all just speculation at this point. It may well be one of those unlikely coincidences that can happen on occasion. This is all circumstantial and there is no definitive proof. No one should come to any conclusions or make unfounded accusations until the ongoing investigations uncover conclusive evidence. For now, it is nothing more than a very curious coincidence.
New advertisement lingo for warmers
Climate Change It’s Fake But Accurate!
Kozlowski said @ February 17, 2012 at 9:31 pm
Except for The Git. He is not only anti-climate, he has actively engaged in opposing the climate where he lives (Southern Tasmania) by building a greenhouse to grow his tomatoes, eggplants, capsicums, cucumbers and chillies. Now if you guys in the Northern Hemisphere could see your way to sending some of this “global” warming down south, The Git promises to become a proper sceptic and as pro-climate as anyone could ever wish.
Dude: “Even though the person deleted the email account…if the documents were emailed from an HI computer then it would be nothing to find who they sent them to..( sent items folder in case some warmers are reading this) And..they could produce a copy of the email and the attachments.
It should also be noted that if the receiving party deletes the email account a record of it being created will be in the domain archives and should be nothing to find the destination IP. Even if it’s gmail or hotmail whatever computer accessed that account via the web will be known.”
Absolutely the case. Assuming Heartland is telling the truth, yes.
“So as Desmog and others get huffy and try to redirect the topic they will soon feel the pressure. I can’t believe this person would do it this way. IT’S SOOOO STUPID.”
Yup. So if there’s fraud here as described it appears quite poorly done. This is not the sort of information that it makes sense to steal in this way, for exactly the reasons Dude describes.
Unless, of course, Heartland made up their version of events from whole cloth. If Heartland has sent everybody chasing down a scenario that didn’t happen, then it’s possible there was no theft or fraud involved. If there is no apprehension of the perpetrator, then many will continue to suspect that nothing was perpetrated, and that an insider really did have the documents legitimately, possibly even including the hard copy of the strategy document.
The argument regarding the scanned document becomes much weaker if the story of how the information got out is false. Then we don’t know the provenance of anything, and we are back to considering the possibility that someone at HI, probably Bast, was foolish enough to at least draft a document that looked as cynical and obsessive and clueless as that one.
Since Heartland is happy to pay people to say things about science that just aren’t true, it’s hard to muster too much confidence in their (perhaps coincidentally self-serving) version of events. If they track down the perpetrator of exactly the fraud they describe, that will be another story. I am not holding my breath, though.
In short, there are still lots of doubts, but they would be resolved in the event of an arrest and conviction consistent with the story Heartland tells.
The suggestion that someone as socially adept and successful as Peter Gleick is involved in this proposed clumsy heist and forgery is ludicrous and not worth considering either way.
Have HI filed a police report, I wonder?
There are disturbing similarities between the writing of Peter Gleick and those of the “Heartland Insider.”
As noted by others, the over use of commas and run on sentences. Let me add to the list:
– Uses parenthesis (to insert additional ideas) in sentences.
– Hyphenates words that many would normally not.
– Frequently uses double hyphens (or is it called a double dash)?
(this character: “—” or “–” as Gleick does on his Amazon posts.)
In the fraudulent “2012 Confidential” document, we see the following oddly hyphenated words:
“well-known”, “in-house”, “high-profile”, “anti-climate”
From Peter Gleick’s BLOG we have the following oddly hyphenated words:
“human-caused”, “well-endowed”, “carbon-fuel”, “cherry-pick”, “no-no”, “long-term”, “time-series”, “higher-than-average”, “heat-trapping”, “Year-to-year”, “ups-and-downs”, ‘modern-day”, “less-ideological”, etc etc etc, and of course, the all time winner, “anti-climate.”
Not being a grammar-nazi ;), stuff like this really stands out. Most of us would not bother to over-hyphenate our writing.
But wait, there is more…
From his Amazon.com reviews:
“cost-effective”, “self-apply”, “often-paid”, “cherry-picked”, “out-of-context”, “pseudo-science”, “anti-climate” – WHOOPS, there is that “anti-climate” again!
Looking at his BLOG at Forbes, I see a very similar writing style. What do you all think??
http://blogs.forbes.com/petergleick/
All of the same writing elements – long sentences, over use of commas and the double hyphen “—” or is it a dash? It too appears in Confidential 2012.
In summary, let me propose a new “Gate” for this drama. Let’s call it “Hyphen-Gate.” Which sounds better than “Fake-Gate.” This will be especially true if and when the culprit is found, and we find their love of hyphens appears in all of their writing.
Cheers!
Mark,
Do we really need to look for the overlap of your 16 circles when one of them, Circle 6, couldn’t possibly have more than one person in it?
Circle 6: Those who believe that Peter Gleick is a high profile climate scientist.
interesting. There are a couple more things I came up with.
hat tips to the folks at Lucia’s who helped flesh this thing out.
Megan should have given us a bit more credit since she lifts the entire argument.
Now, back to berkeley earth programming.
Meanwhile, in the offices of lawyers Bastard, Bastard & Smith, a Heartland representative is saying “Actually Mr. Smith, I was hoping to speak with one of the others…”
The center of circle 6 would not be a good place to be right now. Only room for one…
Has Heartland had a chance to examine the “apparently authenticated documents” and check for possible alterations yet?
I noticed in Ms. McArdle’s piece that she referenced her previous piece about the Koch Foundation donation. She had included a screenshot from the “fundraising document”. What I don’t understand is that there is an entry for “$200,000” in that screenshot, but Koch’s press release says they only donated $25,000 in 2011. The “fake document” also refers to “$200,000” in 2011. So how did the larger figure get into the chart? Does it possibly represent an alteration and/or manipulation of information in the “fundraising document”?
After all, if perhaps you’re going to the trouble to fake one entire document, why not do a bit of extra jiggering with the others, just to jazz up the story a bit?
That was a great article!
Moreover, the fact is that this document does not merely confirm facts found in other sources. It substantially recasts those facts, in the case of the Koch donation. And in the selection of facts it presents, and the spin it puts on them, it alters the reporting.
Absolutely!
Michael Tobis says:
February 17, 2012 at 10:18 pm
“The suggestion that someone as socially adept and successful as Peter Gleick is involved in this proposed clumsy heist and forgery is ludicrous and not worth considering either way.”
======================
OK, not sure how “socially adept and successful” figures into things, but your defense of the man is noted.
The FBI will take it from here, wire fraud /interstate ?????
I imagine they are really good at this kind of stuff now.
They will get the “perp”.
@Michael Tobis
Perhaps you can encourage your pal Peter Gleick to start discussing your brilliant (sic) thoughts on this publicly….. a lot of people would be more interested in what he has to say right now. Normally he can’t shut up, yet now we hear ……. crickets…… from his neck of the woods.
Tobis would have a point but he is missing one key bit of information.
two bits actually.
Sue, the $200,000 for Koch is the projected income in 2012. In other words a guess. From the real documents the figures are shown.
Name | 2010 Actual | 2011 Actual | 2012 Projected | 2012 as % of 2011 | Project
Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation | $0 | $25,000 | $200,000 | 800% | HCN
This affair brings back great memories of the Dan Rather/Mary Mapes debacle. In that case, the CBS employees tried to pass off a faked Microsoft Word document as a 1970’s vintage memo about George W. Bush. Within a couple days, blog readers with computer expertise proved that the memo couldn’t have come from that era, since it had been created on Microsoft’s modern-day word processing program. Lefty-activists Rather and Mapes were completely discredited. It looks like these fraudsters will suffer the same fate.
Found a website with “resources related to content analysis and text analysis” that might be useful to crowd source the origin of the “fake but accurate” Heartland document. Think of it like those statistical studies of words/letters used in Shakespeare’s plays to determine who the author really was. Would obviously have to obtain some texts from the leading suspect authors of the “fake but accurate” Heartland document.
I also still think it would be useful to find some sort of barely visible “Yellow Dots of Mystery” forensic pattern in the “fake but accurate” Heartland document (e.g. no “yellow dots of mystery” but perhaps shifting of pixels to code the make, model & serial number of the Epson document scanner). Someone with better contacts than I needs to contact a law enforcement evidence technician or the like. Perhaps a local community college forensics program?
Dale says: The Age did that cartoon? You’re kidding right? That paper is so green left that the weekly supplement is actually called “The Green Guide!”
It’s not fair to make fun of the Yank, Dale. They are quite nice, albeit gullible, people (I have been advised). They’ll easily believe you; so give them the facts. The “Green Guide” is printed on green paper and has been for thirty years or more to make it easy to spot when one is looking for the time of a radio (then, now TV as well) show.
And back then “green” meant “unripe” whilst now it means… Mmm…
@Michael Tobis
You can skip the propaganda spew against HI. Instead perhaps you should encourage your pal Peter Gleick to start discussing these matters publicly. Who could have expected he would be silent so long when there is soooo much to discuss? So many are eager to hear from him, a guy who normally cannot shut up, and so far it’s just…… crickets….. from his neck of the woods.
Kozlowski says:
February 17, 2012 at 10:24 pm
I do not disagree with your supposition and logic, but to me these are normally hyphenated phrases, or at least were when I was taught English (a while ago and in England). I think typically if you have a ‘compound adjective’ (not sure what it is called) in which an adjective describes a noun, such as “high-profile”, it is valid to hyphenate the words to show they are in effect a single adjective.
I may of course be wrong and / or common usage may have changed.
ooops sorry all for near duplicate posts, I came back and didn’t see my post, thought I’d closed my browser too fast…. now it seems there is a delay in upload of posts.
sting, stang, stung.
no poley bears, no killamanjaro, no tuvalu…
not much smoke left, is there? now it will have to be outright thuggery to get what they want.
Kozlowski said @ February 17, 2012 at 10:24 pm
There are “disturbing similarities” between The Git’s prose and that of writers he particularly admires. You go a bridge too far perhaps.
Not likely. The Obama Administration has been orchestrating just this sort of “community organizing” (aka dirty tricks) under the protection of the U.S. Attorney General in a number of other incidents, so the prospect of this Administration permitting the FBI to effectively investigate this incident appears to be about as forthcoming as the Attorney General’s responsiveness to the threat of prison time for contempt of Congress in the ongoing Fast and Furious inquiries. Given the Obama Administration’s November 2011 instructions to have the FBI circulate to all law enforcement agencies an advisory finding anyone voicing concerns about government violations of the Constitution as potential domestic terrorists seems to put the Heartland Institute and its supporters as parties of interest to the FBI, rather than the perpetrators of this illegal identity theft and smear.
Michael Tobis says, “Since Heartland is happy to pay people to say things about science that just aren’t true,…,” with the link pointing to a blog supposing that Patrick Michaels is so very dead wrong to be skeptical of non-tree-ring temperature proxies.
Well, Michael, presumably you can point us to the physical theory that will extract a physically valid temperature from a diatom shell, or a spleothem, a coral band, a sedimentary varve, or an ice-core ring. Physically valid is not just scale-it-to-a-measurement-trend-and-call-it-temperature statistical hokum. It’s not just we-can-measure-deuterium-and-18-O and never mind about the possible monsoon shifts or rainings out that are hiding behind the curtain. And it’s not just the ad hoc and tendentious assignment of temperature to the PC1 of a proxy qualitatively judged to be temperature limiting.
Where’s the falsifiable physical theory, Mike? Where are the physical equations that will transform a spleothem (ice core ring, coral band, varve, etc.) into a temperature? If you don’t have them (and you don’t), then Patrick Michaels is correct, Heartland is innocent of any wrong-doing, your champion is wrong, and so are you. Proxy so-called temperatures are not physically real. They have no physical meaning.
I am so tired of people who call themselves scientists all the while taking a thoroughly glaringly obviously facile pseudo-science and elevating it to holy writ. What is it with you people, that you hold your professional integrity so cheaply?
William Astley – you realise that IPCC/CAGW fanatics burn people like you at the stake.
There is almost no greater heresy to the CAGW faithful than publicly stating there are natural climate cycles, but then to add the greatest heresy of all by stating “rising carbon dioxide levels are beneficial” will cast you down to the seventh level of IPCC hell.
The fact you are correct means absolutely nothing to the CAGW faithful, but then most cult followers are like that, as they all have the same mantra: “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up.”
California and the “teaching science” thing signalled NCSE.com to me.
Looks like Jeff Masters never got the memo….
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2037
RM3 Frisker FTN – And the forensic potentials do not end with the Epson scanner or crowd sourced statistics analyses. For example, the file itself was uploaded from a specific computer, likely by FTP, to a given server at a specific time with it’s own unique bits n’ bytes. Such events are recorded at each end and at various places along the way. It could be as little as a date stamp or as much as a totally unique file header sitting somewhere in cache just waiting to lay bare the exact location of the computer used to put the file on the net.
Whoever the smear merchant is, if they are not worried about such things they are either extremely smart to have completely covered their tracks or … not very.
Given on how things on going for them thus far I’ll bet on the latter. We know you are out there Mr./Mrs. Smear Merchant and we’re all coming for you! I hope your arrest is video-taped and turns out <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=h-8hkD-QoW4#t=470s"just like the one of Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo. (@7:50)
Pat Frank said @ February 18, 2012 at 12:46 am
Truly admirable Mr Frank 🙂
Dennis Ray Wingo says:
February 18, 2012 at 1:22 am
“Looks like Jeff Masters never got the memo….
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2037
”
The guy hawks Mooney and Oreskes? Oi.
Jer0me says: “… I think typically if you have a ‘compound adjective’ (not sure what it is called) in which an adjective describes a noun, such as “high-profile”, it is valid to hyphenate the words to show they are in effect a single adjective.”
Phew… Thank you, Jer0me. That opinion is Strengthening Medicine to me. I fully agree with you and take heart to continue writing in exactly the manner you set out. I have been tempted of recent times to leave out the hyphen which I really wish to use and believe is appropriate; but no longer. Hold the bridge!
Guys, remember the post the other day where I said, we would need another document
http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/fake.pdf
This has at least the same time stamp mechanism of -08:00 I wonder if you clever guys could compare the documents ?
Logic miss. You go to the effort of providing a science (module) curriculum for schools in order to be effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science. The second problem is that I have never, ever read from any sceptic a sentence that seeks to dissuade teachers from teaching science. What I have read is the need to teach better science and to present both sides of the argument. Just take a look at Al Gores Inconvenient Truth which was taken to court and was found to have made 9 factual errors. I see no difference her.
Fake but real. Cold but warm. 10:10 anyone?
Koch says that their contribution was for health care, not global warming
http://www.kochfacts.com/kf/confrontingfalsehoodsheartland/
Koch also funded the BEST temperature project which was run by climate scientists etc. Where is the outrage?
Own goal. I will not be surprised to see a jump in Heartland’s funding ($6.5 million) as people realise the size of their small budget compared to say the Sierra Club which received $25,000,000 from the gas industry alone!
Imagine if FOIA (Climategate email distributor) had included just ONE fake email to spice things up. There would have been no Climategate. The other documents are bland and unsurprising. Koch brothers gave money for health care and so on. However, you are free to see what you want to see.
Jimbo says: “Logic miss. You go to the effort of providing a science (module) curriculum for schools in order to be effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.”
No, Jimbo. Perhaps that sentence should have been expanded to cover the potential for it to be miss-understood; but it does not say to dissuade teachers from teaching, but that these two elements which (are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science) need spelling out with clarity so that teachers can feel confident in pointing this (controversial and uncertain) out (teaching it).
Put another way: “sceptic” is not an impure word, nor an unmentionable disease and that needs spelling out (thereby supporting teachers).
Well, to my utter suprise, the DeSmog bloggers have actually taught me something:
the opposite of ‘skeptic’ is ‘credulous boob’
That got me wondering, unlike the oil and gasoline business, the natural gas industry is a highly regulated municipal commodity like telephone poles and water supply. who receives the huge bulk of its income on the basis of government controlled rates. The basis for such rate determination is the cost of the gas, the cost of its delivery, advertising, the profit they negotiated for, etc.
If any of the costs for the gas burning in my furnace and the gas that generated my electricity went toward donations to the Sierra Club – I WANT TO KNOW HOW MUCH so I can request a refund of that amount. Just as union members cannot be forced to pay any portion of a union’s political donations, customers of municipal natural gas utilities and any other municipal utilities that buy natural gas should not be forced to pay any portion of the gas company’s ‘charitable’ donations, especially ones that are really for a political agenda aiming to raise the price of the fuel to fund energy alternatives they wish to foist on us that cost ten times more and all on the basis of a hoax.
(Scott Brown, are you listening..?)
There are things called Gmail, Hotmail, net cafes and memory sticks.
I see the BBC has dropped all reference to Heartland on their front page and Richard Black’s great scientific coup of the day is:
@BBCRBlack via Twitter
Sake brewer rescues yeast from #fukushima, re-starts production.
This man is a true journalistic giant. I hope he has checked his sources.
Anthony,
You need to put up a post based on the following comment AFTER checking facts.
“DeSmogBlog is a smear site founded by a scientifically unqualified public relations man, James Hoggan and [b]funded by a convicted money launderer, John Lefebvre.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/17/the-desmoggers-are-crashing-and-burning/#comment-895941
Jimbo Says ..
‘Are you actually all now arguing that your arguments in favour of leaking emails don’t apply if it’s done to people you support?’
It a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. When climategate happened, the furore was about these are stolen emails and should not be published .. cry cry .. wipe eyes.
Now these documents have been stolen and/or faked they are published all over the AGWosphere – talk about hipocrites.
Now though it would seem that it is ok to completely fake a document and pretend it is real and it makes it to MSM so imagine what the skeptics could fake if they wanted to .. but they dont, they are not that way inclined. Skeptics search for real science – not faked, made up or failed hypothesis upon failed hypothsis .. It would seem that the only argument the alarmists have is Ad hom and fakery – nothing scientific.
cui bono says:
February 17, 2012 at 5:41 pm
“He was so fast in doing an Amazon review of Donna’s book on the IPCC he practically gave off Cherenkov radiation!”
I like it! Now, that is fast….
Ross Kaminsky: “It uses the term ‘anti-climate’ to refer to Heartland’s own position — a derogatory term which climate skeptic outfits never use to describe their positions…”
“Anti-climate” is not a “derogatory” term; it’s a nonsensical term. That is why a sceptic would never use it with regard to their own or anyone else’s position.
Could this be the reason why DSBlog published those documents.
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2008/02/01/blog-funder-guilty-money-laundering
If people started pointing blog fingers at me and blackening my name as the perpetrator of Fakegate, I might feel inclined to do nothing and give them the confidence to dig a hole for themselves so deep that there was no possibility of escape. I’d simply arrange to be called away from my computer for a few days then come back and be horrified.
I was curious about how well the news of the fake Heartland document has been spread so I Googled and Binged for news in the last 24 hours. It was hard to find any evidence that this news has made it into the most recent news stories. Anyone not linked into a skeptic website would see dozens of stories attacking Heartland Institute on the basis of the “leaked” documents and would probably not be aware that anything was amiss. A USA Today story quoted AP as verifying the accuracy of components of the document that they checked. There appears to be some clever wording in that particular article to spin the story against Heartland. Just my take, I could be wrong.
I suspect that the only reason that the genuine documents were stolen in the first place was to lend authenticity to the “package” containing the fake – including to ensure that the stationery format matched Heartland’s current usage.
Anthony—it should be oh-the huge manatee as far as desmog goes—
http://carlsagansdanceparty.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/oh-huge-manatee_500x500.jpg
Reblogged this on Not Good News and commented:
Leftists caught spreading untrue propaganda once again.
German left-of-centre media continue in NYT style, admitting one document is called fake by the Heartland Institute but go on to treat the whole thing as one of the “legit” leaks that the Left around the planet so embraces (as long as it ain’t ClimateGate). They also love to say “Koch Brothers” without telling their readers that those 25K Koch money were for a Health care related project.
They really don’t have high standards – whatever fits in their belief system is printed. This newspaper BTW counts as “moderate” and “reputable”.
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/vertrauliche-akten-veroeffentlicht-die-geldquellen-der-klimaskeptiker-1.1287309
mikemUK says:
February 18, 2012 at 4:51 am
I suspect that the only reason that the genuine documents were stolen in the first place was to lend authenticity to the “package” containing the fake – including to ensure that the stationery format matched Heartland’s current usage.
Come on, that’s kind of topsy-turvy: you’re saying the plan was to fake a document and to also steal something to make the fake seem more authentic? What are the chances?
As has already been theorised: much more likely is that documents were stolen, which turned out to be not exactly as damning as the thieves had hoped. So then they brought out Plan B – a rather shoddily knocked-up fake that only the stupid or the religiously brainwashed would fall for. Talk about an own goal!
The gob-smacking quote from the Edmonton Journal article:
“…The resources available for “naysaying” are much greater than the resources scientists have at their disposal to counter misinformation, said Federoff, a geneticist and veteran of the heated debates over genetically modified organisms…”
Another example of modern journalism: don’t question dumb comments by your interviewee if they support your agenda
The best defense is a good offense.
Time to unleash the “key” to the unimpeachable other 200,000 emails?
Hello Climategate 3.0+
Smacking myself in the head… It is sooo freaking obvious that the doc is a fake. The title screams it. Anyone who has actually written confidential documents would have never titled it such. That is something you use in a comedy like Police Squad or Hot Shots to make it obvious in a Hollywood movie. If Confidential was used in the title, it would never start like that. It would be “2012 Hearlland Climate Strategy – Confidential” AND normally there would be a Confidential watermark or Confidential with a legalize as the footer or header (which Heartland uses as the footer only on the title page – they should fix that).
Are you going to link to Ms. McArdle’s comments on this post:
“The first two links are to my post, and they are an egregious misrepresentation of what I said.”
[Reply: the link is just above the quotes. But here it is again. -REP]
I agree that it is primarily nonsensical but also derogatory in a self deprecating kind of way. “Anti-climate” is a term that THEY use among themselves to describe us but the nit-wit who used the term is so brainwashed he/she must actually believe we also think that of ourselves. There isn’t one AGW skeptic anywhere who would self identify with the label “anti-climate” anymore than James Hansen would self identify as being a charlatan, (that he is…)
We aren’t only dealing with a pack of liars, we’re dealing them plus all those paid to lie on their behalf. Fortunately they didn’t pay enough to whoever concocted this ringer.
Another fortunate thing is that liars do not know what it is like to be honest so they can only guess at it. A distinct disadvantage for them I’d say.
Jimbo, all the facts are confirmed in my post,
http://www.populartechnology.net/2011/04/truth-about-desmogblog.html
“A former president and co-founder [John Lefebvre] of payment processor NETeller pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a conspiracy charge related to handling billions of dollars in illegal gambling proceeds.”
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2007/07/11/oukin-uk-neteller-founder-plea-idUKN1036368620070711
“Two former directors and founding shareholders of NETeller Plc [Stephen Lawrence, John Lefebvre], a British online money transfer company, have been charged in the United States with laundering billions of dollars in illegal gambling proceeds.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/01/16/us-crime-neteller-idUSN1622302920070116
Actually, in the case of GMO (genetically modified organisms), he’s right IMO. The ones opposing GMOs are the enviro groups, who are the ones with the very deep pockets.
—————
theduke,
I would be very much surprised if the Climate Science Rapid Response Team was completely unaware of the events leading up to the publishing of the fake HI document.
John
You should link Led Zepellin’s Communication Breakdown to the pic in the post.
re: Pat Frank
I would point out that 1) it was Singer, not to my knowledge Michaels and 2) this is an attack on the whole idea of proxies, which doesn’t directly respond to Singer’s claims that there is no proxy evidence, which is throughly refuted by Kau’s article.
Regarding the way specific proxy series are validated, I am not expert. I will vouch for the corals producing credible and globally coherent ENSO records, just from my knowledge at present.
Pat, is it your claim that there is no such thing as paleoclimate evidence? Is it your claim that there is no science without equations reducible to physics? That’s naive and practically solipsistic.For instance, it pretty much throws away everything that any MD ever does, and I’d be willing to argue the same for most engineering.
Science, even the physics you revere, is ultimately empirical.
As for the details of the specific proxies, I hope the experts will step up to the plate at the referenced article, where I have copied your complaint. (I hope you don’t mind.) Else we’ll have to start digging, right, in a spirit of fair inquiry?
It’s clearly possible there are two perps here. One that stole the documents and one that built the fake one. The former could be someone without connections who sent the documents to a person they thought would be interested. If that was the case it would smart for whomever got the stuff to come clean immediately. Yes, they did receive stolen goods but they could possibly claim they were unaware of that. However, if they wait they make it appear like they knew all along and are hoping no one will track them down.
LOL,
the beatings of the warmist camps continues.
Will they ever learn?
Thanks! I don’t have access to those documents and wondered why Ms. McArdle didn’t comment about the “$200,000” figure. Then that is more evidence that the “fake document” is a fake; I can’t imagine writing up some kind of presentation for a Board and misstating “2012 Projected” as “returned as a Heartland donor in 2011 with a contribution of $200,000”.
The wikipedia weasel completely fell for it.
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2012/02/heartland.php
You just know this whole scheme was hatched in some Occupy Berkeley brainstorming session.
Personally, I think this episode is going to be a game changer for many people who were previously sitting on the fence wondering whether to keep faith with the “team” or explore options with the [evil] sceptics.
When it started, it could have been passed off as a lone warmist … one individual with too much enthusiasm. But, the way the BBC, Guardian, the team and a host of other people have fallen for this hook line and sinker even though it is obvious the key document was faked and what the others show is not a lot except the LACK OF BIG-OIL funding, means that their credibility is shot to shreds.
But so too has this myth of the BIG-OIL funded evil sceptic empire. Which then makes it difficult to form your views relying solely on the journalists who have been insisting their is an evil BiG-OIL funded sceptic empire. They and the team have obviously been gullible … even after it was acknowledge as a fake by sceptic and non-sceptic alike, they have been ready & willing to stoke up hysteria on clearly faked documents.
Which just about removes all credibility from their hyperbole and leaves people with no option other than to judge on the facts: who predicted what, when and was it accurate.
And we all know that when it comes to the facts we have the upper hand. Leaving aside the same people predicted global cooling, in 2001 the team predicted temperatures would rise between 0.14-0.58C/decade. None of them predicted it would not rise at all. Most predicted something “sinister” like the notorious : “According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.” (independent 2000 The truth is that extreme weather events have not increased, temperatures have not increased. The team have been shown to be gullible people looking for conspiracy under every rock … leaving us sceptics looking like paradigms of virtue in comparison with rock steady arguments based on facts …. and no sign of BIG-OIL.
They’ve thrown everything they can at us … and they have still lost. They have used every insult in the book … and they have all been found to be hollow.
There is a Monty Python Sketch of the Black knight who refuses to yield. First one arm is chopped off, then another, then a leg, then another then the black knight says: “you still can’t past” as Arthur walks by. The team have lost … the only question is how much of a kicking will they take before they admit it.
DirkH says:
February 18, 2012 at 10:56 am
“The wikipedia weasel completely fell for it.”
I better quote him before he makes it disappear:
William M. Connolley; razor-sharp intellect:
“Ah, now from Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy this bit is horrible:
effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science
which I think really shows the Heartland folk in their true light: their aim is to prevent people being taught science.”
“Man Bearpigg says:
February 18, 2012 at 2:01 am
Guys, remember the post the other day where I said, we would need another document
http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/fake.pdf
This has at least the same time stamp mechanism of -08:00 I wonder if you clever guys could compare the documents ?”
Man Bearpigg, you can just open the PDF (and any file for that matter) in a text editor. On a mac, open it in TextEdit. On a PC, use Winword. It is messy but will show you quite a bit. On a graphic file it will show you much of the EXIF data.
Here is some of the data from your “Fake.PDF” file above:
%PDF-1.4
%µµµµ
1 0 obj
<</Type/Catalog/Pages 2 0 R/Lang(en-US) /OutputIntents[<>] /Metadata 2310 0 R>>
endobj
Then we have the data from the file “2012 Climate Strategy”
%PDF-1.5
%‚„œ”
18 0 obj
<>
endobj
31 0 obj
<</DecodeParms<>/Filter/FlateDecode/ID[]/Index[18 20]/Info 17 0 R/Length 72/Prev 98556/Root 19 0 R/Size 38/Type/XRef/W[1 2 1]>>stream
hfibbd“b`™ v@Çq’à,+ÅÛRÎ,à±òÇX´AƒvqH‹ g`bdI000¢ˇè˝0˝
endstream
endobj
startxref
%%EOF
And finally the same from the file “2010_IRS_FORM_990”
%PDF-1.5
%‚„œ”
157 0 obj
<>
endobj
163 0 obj
<</DecodeParms<>/Filter/FlateDecode/ID[]/Index[157 9]/Info 156 0 R/Length 44/Prev 2826815/Root 158 0 R/Size 166/Type/XRef/W[1 2 0]>>stream
hfibbd`b`ö»ƒ¿‡ƒƒ¿ÿ§KÄÙ &Ü?øôtô˛3™LR⁄
endstream
endobj
startxref
%%EOF
Conclusion: The file you link to, Fake.pdf, was done on a different scanner than the other two. However, the two files related to Hyphen-Gate (or Fake-gate, or Anti-Climate Gate ;), appear to have been scanned on the same scanner. There is a difference in parms, but that would be normal. Beyond that the formatting would lend credence to the idea that they were done on at the very least, the same brand, make and model of scanner.
I tested two of the scanners I have in my office and both of them generate similar but significantly different data.
Pompous Git: You are right, it is a bridge too far. Mere speculation on the hyphens, mere speculation on the term “anti-climate.” But it is a pattern isn’t it. Our brains are designed to tease patterns out of data. We can’t help it 🙂
And nothing against hyphens. As a person who reads more than my fair share of books, literature, web sites etc, I see a lot of word usage. Certain things stand out. Like when someone is obsessively following hyphen rules as if they were still in college. Most of us gave that up decades ago 😉
Cheers!
Fake.pdf is not even created with a scanner. It’s produced from the word processor.
Speculating a bit more about the sentence alluding to stopping teaching science. It is the clearest attempt by the forger at putting a ‘smoking gun’ in Heartland’s hand, as evidenced by this sentence being ridden to town by pro-CAGW journos in their articles.
It’s very oddly phrased and barely grammatically correct. It caught my eye because it’s strange but also because it pushes a position that is not Heartland’s goal. They are a libertarian outfit and this memo is ostensibly focused on climate change. Heartland openly admits they want to balance what they see as unbalanced science education on climate change. They don’t want to stop science education. Libertarians are generally pro-science, math and engineering. Economics is science. Howard Roark was an architect. Hank Rearden was an engineer.
The only group that might support the ‘anti-science’ position the forger attempts to put in Heartland’s mouth would be fundamentalist creationists. It doesn’t make sense for Heartland. A large segment of the libertarian population are agnostic, atheist or at least non-devout. So what group might want to lump CAGW realists with unrelated creationists? Well, one example might be the NCSE, a group who has recently expanded its mission from defending public science education against creationists (a laudable goal), to now include defending science education against CAGW ‘deniers’ (a nonsensical goal because the decade or two old, as yet unproven, CAGW hypothesis is far from deserving anything like the stature of Darwin’s 150 year old experimentally validated, independently replicated theory of evolution).
This NCSE group seems somewhat unique in their desire to paint creationists and CAGW ‘deniers’ with the same broad brush when it comes to science education. Is it possible folks identifying with this organization’s mission (perhaps donors, supporters, staffers or board members) might form a Circle 17? It would be curious indeed if an organization such as NCSE were to begin using this oddly targeted ‘smoking gun’ sentence from a forged document in their promotion and fund-raising.
Circle 18: Those that are familiar with the mechanics of board membership, such as the fact that packets of board documents are circulated to board members in advance of, or following, board meetings. Having sat on and chaired various boards of corporations I’m quite familiar with this and know how typical it would be for an administrative assistant to get a call from a board member asking for a resend of the packet. However, this knowledge is not at all common in the general population.
BTW, some might feel that Mosher’s purely circumstantial, completely unproven and only-speculated potential ‘person of interest’ appears to, purely coincidentally, fit both of these circles as well.
The perpetrator might never be officially identified but if I had innocently and carelessly published the questioned document, I would most certainly have issued some sort of disclaimer long before this time.
Mark says:
February 18, 2012 at 12:04 pm
“So what group might want to lump CAGW realists with unrelated creationists? Well, one example might be the NCSE”
http://ncse.com/climate-change/leading-climate-change-expert-joins-ncse-board
January 13th, 2012
“Dr. Peter Gleick, president and co-founder of The Pacific Institute, has joined NCSE’s board of directors. Gleick, a world-renowned water expert, will advise NCSE on its new climate change education initiative. ”
“I’m delighted that NCSE is taking on the climate change education component,” says Gleick. “If NCSE can do for climate change what it has done for evolution education, policy makers may finally get in line to do what they should be doing.”
Marcus McSpartacus says:
So. The other documents, and their contents are accurate?
No one knows, yet. Of the documents put up on DSB, at least one was faked, some of them were publically available, others were stolen. It is not known if the ones that were not fabricated from whole cloth have nonetheless been latered.
Is the argument here actually that because you think this one is fake, therefore the other information is inadmissable?
One wonders what you mean by “inadmissable”, as none of the “other information” appears to be in any way incriminating. At any rate, the clear and obvious fake renders this source unreliable. Any “information” you’d want to use from it would first have to be authenticated.
Are you actually all now arguing that your arguments in favour of leaking emails don’t apply if it’s done to people you support?
Has nothing to do with who you support. The principle behind support for “whistleblowing”, is that there has to be a compelling and legitimate counter interest that is supported by the leak of information. WRT the statutory requirements for one to be shielded by “whistleblower” laws from prosecution for theft, that typically requires that the leaked information is incriminating or demonstrates a breach of fiducial responsibility.
Apart from the fact that the Climategate emails are the result of public funding, and thus cannot be “stolen”, the content of those emails meets the standard for “whistle blowing”. The theft of the Heartland documents doesn’t. Too, there is nothing damaging to the scientific research in the leaked Climategate emails – that isnt possible given that science is supposed to be based on free inquiry and truth. On the other hand, leaking donor lists and budgets is very damaging to an advocacy organization. It harms their ability to raise funds, and tips off opposition to their areas of interest.
Damage to the professional interests of those exposed by the Climategate depends entirely on the material being incriminating or demonstrative of unprofessional behaviour and true. Damage to Heartland’s professional interest turns on the release of confidential information that is not incriminating. The two circumstances are simply not comparable.
@Mark
@DirkH
Hmmm….. This does add some fascinating material…. I keep wondering about what kind of mind would exhibit all of the beliefs, interests, and Projections we see in the fake strategy doc. To avoid assuming it could be Gleick, let’s simply try to describe someone “like” him who exists in all of these circles…. Perhaps an overly zealous acolyte of Gleick’s who lacks judgment, ethics, and sobriety.
Just think of the unknown perp as not “Son of Gleick” but “Gleick’s Frankenstein” and we might not be too far off???
Mini-gleick?☺
Oh look. Michael Tobis:
“After a recent leak of internal Heartland Institute documents describing a purported campaign to sow doubt about climate change science, Heartland claimed one of the documents might be fake”
MIGHT be fake? Michael, you distort what Heartland says.
“Now the shoe is on the other foot, and if the leaked Heartland documents are authentic, they leave no room for interpretation.”
You give a “leaker” credibility that adds a faked juicy pamphlet to some dull bookkeeping authentic docs? You don’t question the motivation of this concoction?
“They even go so far as to gin up a science curriculum designed to “dissuade” public schoolteachers from teaching science—a shocking plan to undermine education and turn our public schools into mouthpieces for agenda-driven propaganda.”
So you are treating the fake part of the documents as authentic.
“Jim DiPeso
Policy Director
Republicans for Environmental Protection”
Ah. So it wasn’t your writing at all. You have just copied the text, without any comment. Sorry. I should have interpreted the two tiny words “Press release:” at the top as meaning “We haven’t written this, we’re only copying it”, right?
Now, Michael Tobis, your entire post consists of this press release, so excuse me, I treat it as YOUR MESSAGE. You have added NO CONTENT OF YOUR OWN.
So you picked your side.
@Smokey
A huge ROFL here…. That wins my vote!
perhaps we are looking for mini-Gleick!
Skiphil says:
February 18, 2012 at 12:39 pm
“Just think of the unknown perp as not “Son of Gleick” but “Gleick’s Frankenstein” and we might not be too far off???”
Gleick with a goatee? Doppelgleick? Gleickenstein.
Michael Tobis, apologies for the Singer-Michaels mix-up.
You wrote, “this is an attack on the whole idea of proxies, which doesn’t directly respond to Singer’s claims that there is no proxy evidence,…
Michael, if the “proxies” are not proxies, then there is no proxy evidence. That’s pretty basic, and if you don’t get that, there’s no point talking further.
You say that, “the corals [produce] credible and globally coherent ENSO records,” but that’s not the point is it. The point is whether corals produce physical temperature records.
Corals respond to, e.g., temperature, precipitation, nutrient flux, and predation. How does anyone extract physically valid degrees centigrade from that? And yet, proxy temperature trends are authoritatively published with ordinates showing resolutions of 0.2 C. Those plots are scientifically meaningless. Worse, they reflect either disingenuousness or incompetence. There is no other choice. And honestly, I don’t think the answer is disingenuousness.
You asked, “Pat, is it your claim that there is no such thing as paleoclimate evidence?” Evidence of what, Michael? Warmer-wetter/cooler-drier? Or degrees centigrade? The degrees may be there, but we won’t know until there’s a physical theory with which to derive them. Or do you deny that?
You asked, “Is it your claim that there is no science without equations reducible to physics?” I claim there is no science without a falsifiable theory. Physics has them. Chemistry has them. Biology has them. Geology has them. Climate modeling does not. Neither does proxy temperature. It’s good to keep your science straight, Michael. And it’s neither naive nor solipsistic to pay attention to what is science and what most assuredly is not. Proxy thermometry is not science.
What MDs do is grounded in Biology. What engineers do is grounded in Physics. Nothing in either profession makes sense without the backing of their foundational science. One might argue empirical rules of thumb, but I promise you won’t make that case.
I’ve argued the proxy case at Steve McIntyre’s CA. Rob Wilson, a proxy professional, took issue. He had no good defense. Neither will your cadre. It’s all just associational arguments decorated with numerical filters and statistical arcana.
Proceed with your digging, Michael. The verdict won’t change.
From an update at DeSmogBlog at the top of the Heartland story:
“Update: Apparently even the Koch brothers think the Heartland Institute’s climate denial program is too toxic to fund. On Wednesday, Koch confirmed that it did not cut a check for the $200K mentioned in the strategy memo after all.”
Nice of them to aknowledge a blatant lie in the fake ‘Heartland strategy memo.’ Yet the DeSmogBlog article goes on to quote from this same proven bogus source, repeating the claim they have already admitted false!
The January 2012 Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy states:
“We will also pursue additional support from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. They returned as a Heartland donor in 2011 with a contribution of $200,000. “
Perhaps, like a growing number of people, they have stopped reading their own stuff!
Wanna see a professional writer’s take.
Donna Laframboise shows how it is done, here:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/02/17/big-oil-money-for-me-but-not-for-thee/
Wow, the denialosphere is really scared pantiless by the documents that expose the secret funding of anti-science nonsense. Embarrassed, Watts?
TRM says:
February 17, 2012 at 6:28 pm
LOL. I was wondering if I was the only one who had that thought.
yawn says:
February 18, 2012 at 1:57 pm
Isn’t it embarrassing when you can’t keep up?
DaveE.
I have paraphrased the following comment I made at Judith Curry’s place. It seems to fit the DeSmogger’s recent contribution to the final demise of their ‘cause’.
John Whitman said:
“. . . . . . I started reflecting on the mental image of the Colossal Ruins that was once the mighty consensus edifice of the IPCC centric theory of catastrophic AGW by CO2. This poem, first read when I was ~13, comes to mind:”
John
“yawn says:
February 18, 2012 at 1:57 pm
Wow, the denialosphere is really scared pantiless by the documents that expose the secret funding of anti-science nonsense. Embarrassed, Watts?”
===========================================
Um what reality are you posting from again?
Scared no, laughing our backsides off about how stupid it was of the warmistas to run with this yes.
Just what planet are your from?
We think it is hilarious that the pro CAGW folks would do something so stupid, and that the blogs and news organizations are falling all over themselves to out idiot each other.
They are misquoting and totally twisting the papers, and totally ignoring (or perhaps too stupid to notice) that they are quoting a forged document as a smoking gun expose. We are not scared pantiless we are stunned at how stupid the extreme left/CAGW is, and their willingness to parade their incompetence so openly without having a single clue they are making world class fools of themselves.
Their own pro CAGW groups get orders of magnitude more money from the power brokers who are trying to sell this scam, and they are completely oblivious that they are trumpeting a completely fabricated story as if it had any meaning. Not to mention demonstrating to the rational world that they have no ethics, have no skill as journalists (violate the most basic principles of good journalism), and totally misunderstand the lack of valid science.
They are creating a key stone cops caricature of how a popular movement based on fabricated “science” (and I use that term with gritted teeth) self destructs in full public view and destroys 30 years of carefully fabricated credibility in a matter of weeks.
Larry
gleich Gleick? (or fawning follower, whatever).
Timing is interesting, considering the various conferences coming up, books recently appearing,
cold waves (not snaps) crippling europe…nothing like a warm scandal to take one’s mind off
of what is really going on. If it keeps getting colder, I don’t think frozen windmills or
snow-covered solar panels will be of much help…
steven mosher says:
February 17, 2012 at 10:32 pm
interesting. There are a couple more things I came up with.
hat tips to the folks at Lucia’s who helped flesh this thing out.
Megan should have given us a bit more credit since she lifts the entire argument.
Now, back to berkeley earth programming.
Yeah, mosh. No credit. But personal satisfaction. And the word is out now.
“DON’T PEDDLE FAKE STUFF. WE’LL RUN YOU DOWN.”
yawn says:
February 18, 2012 at 1:57 pm
Wow, the denialosphere is really scared pantiless by the documents that expose the secret funding of anti-science nonsense. Embarrassed, Watts?
Yawn,
Nope, I think we are more amused than anything else at this point.
Cheers!
yawn says:
February 18, 2012 at 1:57 pm
=========================
What is with you sky is falling fanatics, your names appear to reflect your mental state. You “yawn”, have clearly been sleeping; “Lazy Teenager”, clearly has been just that; and “Gates” is the back 1/2 of the past.present and future climate-gates, and “Shore” is ever unchanging, defending even Hansen, refusing to move an inch, just like the non rising ocean on the shore.
yawn said @ February 18, 2012 at 1:57 pm
Yawn; think I might have an afternoon nap… Somebody wake me up when one of the trolls says something even vaguely interesting.
Larry Ledwick (hotrod) says (February 18, 2012 at 4:32 pm): “We are not scared pantiless we are stunned at how stupid the extreme left/CAGW is, and their willingness to parade their incompetence so openly without having a single clue they are making world class fools of themselves.”
Well, we already know they’re pretty gullible–they bought into the CAGW nonsense, right?–but this is (almost) too painful to watch.
@bladeshearer says:
From an update at DeSmogBlog at the top of the Heartland story:
“Update: Apparently even the Koch brothers think the Heartland Institute’s climate denial program is too toxic to fund. On Wednesday, Koch confirmed that it did not cut a check for the $200K mentioned in the strategy memo after all.”
=============================================
As I observed elsewhere, if Koch funded the climate sceptics that proves climate sceptics are evil because Koch is evil. If Koch didn’t fund the climate sceptics that proves that the climate sceptics are incredibly evil because even Koch (who are evil), were afraid to fund that level of evilness.
You sort of have to admire the impervious logic. No matter what Koch did or didn’t do, the climate sceptics are proved evil.
yawn says:
February 18, 2012 at 1:57 pm
I’m finding my Sadistic streak now.
OK, what secret funding?
DaveE.
Will Nitschke says:
As I observed elsewhere, if Koch funded the climate sceptics that proves climate sceptics are evil because Koch is evil. If Koch didn’t fund the climate sceptics that proves that the climate sceptics are incredibly evil because even Koch (who are evil), were afraid to fund that level of evilness.
This is from the same crew for whom a heat wave is proof of global warming, a cold spell is proof of global warming, a drought is proof of global warming, a flood is proof of global warming, etc.
There isnt really anything to admire, except perhaps the fact that despite this severe cognitive impairment, they seem to be able to eke out a decent existence. Granted, they are always demanding heavy subsidies from the rest of us to make it happen, but they do pretty well. Rather like being a functioning alcoholic, I suppose.
@ Michael Tobis
“The suggestion that someone as socially adept and successful as Peter Gleick is involved in this proposed clumsy heist and forgery is ludicrous and not worth considering either way.”
You wouldn’t expect “someone as socially adept and successful as Peter Gleick” to write a review of a book he didn’t read, either. But Gleick did write a review of a book he hadn’t read.
He made a donkey out of himself with that review. Nay, a zebra!
This looks pretty bad for Dr. Gleick. He posted the following on Twitter a few hours ago:
“Great to be away with family. Celebrating 2 big birthdays. (Total =100!)” http://twitter.com/#!/PeterGleick
Not a very convincing “alibi”.
There are only two possibilities here…
1. He’s well aware of this whole fiasco, and has read the growing speculation linking him to the fake memo. Rather than denying involvement, he’s staying VERY quiet and pretending to be “off the grid”, while he ponders how best to defend himself.
2. He’s genuinely unaware of what’s been going on in the last 5 days. In which case, he’s in for one heck of surprise when he next opens his email inbox.
I find either possibility equally entertaining.
DirkH says:
February 18, 2012 at 10:58 am
DirkH says:
February 18, 2012 at 10:56 am
“The wikipedia weasel completely fell for it.”
Wikipedia-Weasel.
Ho-Ho-Ho !!!
I paid no attention to Gleick before this Fakegate saga, but a quick scan now of his twitter feed shows a rather obsessive ‘tweeter’ who rarely misses a day or two. Often he has many tweets in one day. Of course one can email or tweet without necessarily catching up with the online world overall, but for someone as digitally connected as Gleick to be really “off grid” for more than a few hours or a couple of days is difficult to believe. Also, he is the President of his Pacific Institute, not merely some research associate, so it is exceedingly difficult to believe hat someone has not filled him in fully even if he were on a vacation.
One guess is he’s waiting to see what develops in public and private. Considering the volume of his web chatter on much lesser issues (many of utter insignificance to his own life and interests) it is truly remarkable to see his continued silence.
Gleick-Gate?
[snip . . this is just trolling . . try harder . . kbmod]
yawn says:
February 18, 2012 at 1:57 pm
“Wow, the denialosphere is really scared pantiless by the documents that expose the secret funding of anti-science nonsense. Embarrassed, Watts?”
Actually I’m not scared, I’m glued to my computer waiting for the next stupidity from the alarmosphere. Bring it on, I can’t wait! It’s so funny watching you hit yourselves.
“… the denialosphere is really scared pantiless …”
Far more like: “Is that all you got?”
u.k.(us) says:
February 18, 2012 at 1:55 pm
Wanna see a professional writer’s take.
Donna Laframboise shows how it is done, here:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/02/17/big-oil-money-for-me-but-not-for-thee/
_____
Indeed. Environmental activism has evolved into an extortion racket.
@Kozlowski February 17, 2012 at 10:24 pm
I don’t know what it signifies, but all the examples that you give of hyphenated words are my standard writing practice!!
IanM
Ironic how the Heartland Inst turns to the heavy hand of governmnet intervention when the interaction of private individuals does not suit their purpose.
sceptical says: February 19, 2012 at 11:15 am
Ironic how the Heartland Inst turns to the heavy hand of governmnet intervention when the interaction of private individuals does not suit their purpose.
So, you are suggesting that the Heartland Institute sees no role at all for government and this case represents an instance where the “interaction of private individuals” should be given free reign? And when one of the private individuals refuses to do the right thing, the other should…. what? Like much else you post here, “skeptical”, your position is moronic.
Robert E Phelan, I’m suggesting it is ironic Heartland Inst is calling for the intrusive action of government intervention because the private sector has not meet with the Institutes expectations. I’m suggesting Heartland Inst, like so many free market pretenders, are only against government actions when it suits their purpose and are all for government action when it suits their purpose. I will further suggest that people like yourself will not understand this irony and will instead attack me for pointing out this irony and label things moronic because you do not understand.
[SNIP: Please read the policy page. And your new e-mail address is really, really cute. -REP]
Michael Tobis, still waiting.
sceptical says: February 19, 2012 at 11:59 am
Sceptical, arguing with a caricature and proclaiming “gotcha!” is not ironic. I get irony. Your contribution is just moronic. But as I think about it, your cntribution does have a certain irony to it: the moron thinking he is being ironic.
sceptical says:
February 19, 2012 at 11:59 am
“Robert E Phelan, I’m suggesting it is ironic Heartland Inst is calling for the intrusive action of government intervention because the private sector has not meet with the Institutes expectations. I’m suggesting Heartland Inst, like so many free market pretenders, are only against government actions when it suits their purpose and are all for government action when it suits their purpose. I will further suggest that people like yourself will not understand this irony and will instead attack me for pointing out this irony and label things moronic because you do not understand.”
Sceptical, Heartland Institute sees property rights as fundamental. Property rights need the protection of the rule of law. This is at the core of all free market philosophies – without rule of law, there can be no property rights. The fact that you see an irony here shows that you don’t even know what property rights are.
[snip. ~ dbs, mod.]
DirkH, Heartland Inst sees its own property rights as fundamental, not property rights in general. Heartland Inst and other statist organizations are willing to use the intrusive of power of the state when ever it suits their purposes.
The clown who runs the little green foot balls blog is claiming that Heartland has told him to pull down his threads on this and he put up a thread where he says he will not.
He and many of the other “green tax the rich” lefty blogs will hang on to any climate change misinformation to the end of time. Hope their fingeres do not get cold.
sceptical says:
February 19, 2012 at 12:43 pm
“DirkH, Heartland Inst sees its own property rights as fundamental, not property rights in general. Heartland Inst and other statist organizations are willing to use the intrusive of power of the state when ever it suits their purposes.”
You sound pretty confused. Why not start with some fundamentals.
http://mises.org/
Oh, I get it. If I write “denier”, the comment is censored?
[Reply: The entire comment is deleted for violating the rules. That is not censoring of a different scientific opinion. Read the site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]
sceptical says:
“DirkH, Heartland Inst sees its own property rights as fundamental, not property rights in general. Heartland Inst and other statist organizations are willing to use the intrusive of power of the state when ever it suits their purposes.”
Can anyone be more confused than ‘sceptical’? Property rights are fundamental rights. For everyone. Heartland wants its rights to be defended just like anyone else would.
And the ultimate in ‘statist organizations’ are government bureacracies like GISS, NOAA, etc. They could be completely defunded and the result would be beneficial: private companies would provide the same information, and the politics that President Eisenhower warned against would be eliminated because people don’t pay for propaganda, they pay for accurate information.
‘Sceptical’ has no understanding of statism, he is just regurgitating talking points. I’ll make it simple: as the writers of the original U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights understood, government is inherently evil. Government is necessary for basic functions: defense, adjudication of justice, protection of people and their property. Aside from the basics, government should butt out. The less government, the better for society.
We’re already reaching the point where granny can’t have the operation that will give her another ten years of life, because the government is rationing health care. Where in the Constitution does it say the government’s job is to provide health care, serviced by doctor-bureaucrats? And there are thousands of other examples of government bureaucracies encroaching into areas where the free market does an immensely better job, and for far less money.
So enough with the Saul Alinksy tactics of isolating and demonizing a basically honest, law abiding organization that never has its hand out for taxpayer loot. Save your complaints for tax suckers feeding at the public trough, like Greenpeace, universities, the WWF, Planned Parenthood, and the rest of the NGO rent seekers.
Heartland is voluntary. If you don’t agree with their mission, don’t contribute. No one is making you pay for Heartland, like they’re making the public pay for GISS, and for NASA’s Muslim Outreach programs, etc.
@sceptical
You simply know nothing about political philosophy, libertarian or otherwise. There is no serious “libertarian” view which rules out basic protections of property rights and rule of law. That would be some version of anarchism.
One can argue forever about exact lines and definitions, but there is nothing at all ironic or hypocritical about libertarians insisting upon legal defenses for property rights and privacy rights, however defined. The importance of such rights is at the core of libertarian views.
No, I am not a libertarian. Simply an interested observer….
Whether or not that disputed memo is a fabrication, Heartland and Bast won’t gain much sympathy through heavy-handed tactics.
Joseph Bast threatened a retired colonel who accused him of being a traitor
( http://www.berthoudrecorder.com/2012/02/19/heartland-institute-threatens-71-year-old-veteran/ )
and it seems they plan to sue anyone who posted or commented on the docs and disputed memo?
Good luck with that, fellas. The statement on their site mentions judging the credibility of those who posted the docs – fair enough, but their own credibility is at stake and their actions will likely have as lasting an impact as any number of leaked memos, true or forged.
Whether the disputed memo is a fabrication or not isn’t really very interesting. We’ll never know anyway, and the fact is that it only seems to repeat information that’s verified as being correct in the other docs.
The fact is that there are several docs that reveal disturbing things about how the HI is dishonestly trying to manipulate public opinion and the education system. Arguing over whether two-page document which basically sums up confirmed information is fake or not is a dead end.
yawn says:
February 20, 2012 at 2:33 am
“Whether the disputed memo is a fabrication or not isn’t really very interesting. We’ll never know anyway, and the fact is that it only seems to repeat information that’s verified as being correct in the other docs.”
Go ahead digging, we’ll watch from the sidelines. See what it gets you.
Pat Frank, at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/17/the-desmoggers-are-crashing-and-burning/#comment-897053
“waiting” for what?
“What paleoclimatologists do is grounded in ecology.”
How is that more informative than your “what engineers do is grounded in physics”?
I have a bachelors in engineering from Northwestern.
I remember the textbook on semiconductor circuits pretty clearly. It would start with “empirically, the equation for this is bla bla” and proceeded from there. They never said where the equation came from or how it was justified.
Often there was no physics behind it at all. Sometimes it was just experimental data. Engineers just want things to work.
Of course, I would have been better off writing “How is that Less informative than your “what engineers do is grounded in physics”?”
My point is that they are equally informative claims, i.e., not very.
Applied science uses empirical relationships all the time. Shouldn’t it? If you don’t like it, don’t go to the doctor!
(By the way, Oliver Heaviside founded electrical engineering on mathematical shortcuts that were mathematically invalid. Later, mathematicians came along with some obscure branches of mathematics and cleaned it up. But the stuff he designed worked despite the mathematically invalid reasoning! People really interested in the philosophy of science and how it relates to applications ought to look into it. But they might need some math to get very far.)
Digging? You are not making any sense. The documents have been verified as containing correct and accurate information. For example, the anti-science school curriculum project. Are you going to argue that the facts are correct, but the documents fake? Or what?
Is the information accurate or not? If it is, you can of course continue to do your hand-waving and spew red herrings. It’s much more convenient to focus on a pointless discussion about the validity of a single document than to look at whether the information in the documents is correct or not.
yawn says:
“…a pointless discussion about the validity of a single document than to look at whether the information in the documents is correct or not.”
So we should look at whether a fabricated document is “correct”? That sounds exactly like Dan Rather’s “Fake but accurate”. Rather was fired for that, remember?
Continue crashing and burning, mouth-breather. The fact is that this entire scandal is over the fabrication of a document, not the rest of the information, which is intended to counter the pseudo-science of anthropogenic runaway globaloney.
@Smokey
There is no proof that the document is fabricated, and all the information in simply repeated from the other documents that have been verified as being real.
So until you can prove that the document is fake, you should focus on addressing the evil actions that are being exposed in the other documents.
Also, “mouth-breather”? I bet you won’t be censored for that, whereas if I started being obnoxious in the same way you are, I would be censored in an instant.
“The fact is that this entire scandal is over the fabrication of a document, not the rest of the information”
no, the fact is that the scandal is over the proof that the HI is secretly funding anti-science propaganda, and aiming to replace science with its own political ideology.
Heartland is secretly funding anti-science propaganda, yawn?
That’s odd… I thought they were funding the anti-alarmist stuff. That makes me unhappy. I mean, really, the funding of education in schools is no secret, and part of the reason I have been supporting them. But if there’s some secret anti-science funding going on, I sure as hell want to know about it.
Oh well.
What “anti-science propaganda”? Are they paying for the screenings of “An Inconvenient Truth”? Are they pushing the idea that the world is warming because of CO2 emissions?
yawn says:
“…“mouth-breather”? I bet you won’t be censored for that, whereas if I started being obnoxious in the same way you are, I would be censored in an instant.”
I doubt it. I’ve been called names before off and on, and those comments got posted all the same. Based on your comments attacking everyone, I was having a little fun at your expense. I’d like to see you yawn without opening your mouth.
yawn continues his battle with common sense: “…until you can prove that the document is fake, you should focus on addressing the evil actions that are being exposed in the other documents.”
Heartland immediately stated that one document was fake. And of course, it is. Heartland’s unequivocal statement is there for falsifying, if yawn or any other mouth-breathers can show it was genuine. The onus is not on Heartland to prove a negative. They have already stated that the document was a fabrication. If yawn wants to believe otherwise, the onus is on yawn to show that the document is an official Heartland statement.
And there is nothing whatever “evil” in any of the documents, even the fake one. yawn’s moral compass is broken, that’s all. Probably from reading some of the Climategate I & II emails. Now, thosee exposed true evil… if fraud, conspiracy, inventing years of faked temperature records, pal review, etc., etc., can be called evil. And of course, it is.
No wonder the desmoggers appear to be lunatics. They are. Apropos:
[snip. No redeeming value of any kind. Read the site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]
RE: Michael Tobias,
Like Pat Frank I have considerable doubts about the ability to use tree rings as a proxy thermometer. As science mentor working with students in ecology based science programs, I’ve had the opportunity to ask experienced foresters and biologists this simple question – In choosing between temperature and percipitation, which is more likely to impact tree growth?
I have yet to find anyone picking temperature.
oh…. my….. God!! BREAKING NEWS
February 20, 2012, 8:06 pm
Peter Gleick Admits to Deception in Obtaining Heartland Climate Files
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Peter H. Gleick, a water and climate analyst who has been studying aspects of global warming for more than two decades, in recent years became an aggressive critic of organizations and individuals casting doubt on the seriousness of greenhouse-driven climate change. He used blogs, congressional testimony, group letters and other means to make his case.
Now, Gleick has admitted to an act that leaves his reputation in ruins and threatens to undercut the cause he spent so much time pursuing. His summary, just published on his blog at Huffington Post, speaks for itself. You can read his short statement below with a couple of thoughts from me:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/peter-gleick-admits-to-deception-in-obtaining-heartland-climate-files/?smid=tw-nytimesscience&seid=auto
Do keep up, yawn – the fake document contained errors like this one quoted by Steve McIntyre today on his blog:
“The fake memo put the Koch foundation, prominent in climate activist demonology, in a place of particular prominence and stated that it was funding Heartland’s climate programs to the tune of $200,000 in 2011 and that greater contributions were being sought in 2012. In fact, Koch had contributed only $25,000 to Heartland’s Health Care (HCN) program in 2011 and $200,000 was being sought for this program in 2012.”
Oh, and Gleick has just confessed – see Climate Audit for details.
oh…. my….. God!! BREAKING NEWS
February 20, 2012, 8:06 pm
Peter Gleick Admits to Deception in Obtaining Heartland Climate Files
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Peter H. Gleick, a water and climate analyst who has been studying aspects of global warming for more than two decades, in recent years became an aggressive critic of organizations and individuals casting doubt on the seriousness of greenhouse-driven climate change. He used blogs, congressional testimony, group letters and other means to make his case.
Now, Gleick has admitted to an act that leaves his reputation in ruins and threatens to undercut the cause he spent so much time pursuing. His summary, just published on his blog at Huffington Post, speaks for itself. You can read his short statement below with a couple of thoughts from me:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/peter-gleick-admits-to-deception-in-obtaining-heartland-climate-files/?smid=tw-nytimesscience&seid=auto
johanna says:
February 20, 2012 at 5:47 pm
“Oh, and Gleick has just confessed – see Climate Audit for details.”
Ausgegleickt.
That was quicker than I thought.
yawn says:
February 20, 2012 at 12:08 pm
“Digging? You are not making any sense. The documents have been verified as containing correct and accurate information. For example, the anti-science school curriculum project. Are you going to argue that the facts are correct, but the documents fake? Or what?”
yawn, “digging” as in the Rule Of Holes.
With each comment you are trying to obfuscate the distinction between the boring real information in the docs and the added forged document; the standard PR tactic.
As I said, see what it will get you.
DirkH;
your variant German spelling threw me and Google for a bit.
Ausgegleicht works tho’.
Michael Tobis, waiting for your defense of proxy thermometry. But I see you farmed it out. No sweat. Stay tuned.
You asked: ““What paleoclimatologists do is grounded in ecology.” How is that more informative than your “what engineers do is grounded in physics”?
Physics is grounded in falsifable theory, Mike. Ecology, as such, is not. Evolutionary Theory is falsifiable. Geophysics is falsifiable. Climate futurology is not.
So, you went through a degree in engineering without realizing it’s based in Physics. That’s your loss. A physics base doesn’t mean engineering can have no empirical equations. Chemistry has them too. But no one would think they are not rooted in physical theory. Likewise your engineering empiricism. As Theodosius Dobzhansky said of Biology, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,” so likewise engineering, Mike: Nothing in Engineering makes sense except in light of Physics.
Without physics, engineers haven’t a profession. They only have a trade.
My first reply to Michael Tobis concerning proxy paleothermometry, which concerns the neglected measurement error in the temperature d-O18 proxy.
The second reply concerns the complete non-science of the standard proxy paleo-temperature reconstruction.
As I write this (8:55 pm PST) both posts are still awaiting moderation. We’ll see.
I feel a great disturbance in the Farce. It’s felt like a million lies, dying, all at once.
Well, the experience was lovely. The take-home message? Whoever disagrees with Michael Tobis is either stupid or dishonest, or both.
I posted a series of replies this evening at the Singer thread at Planet3.org, concerning measurement error in dO-18 proxies. It appears that Michael Tobis has deleted the lot of them. There’s the courage of his conviction.
That’s become a trend for him. In our debate at his old blog, now here, he apparently got frustrated, posted a pathetic insult, and then closed the thread.
I’ll probably repost the Singer thread replies here.
Michael Tobis has after all, allowed a sanitized version of one post, allowed two verbatim, and didn’t allow a fourth.
This post was truncated because of, “… insulting ad hominem commentary removed – AS …”. Below is the post in its original entirety with the “insulting ad hominem” bolded, as an object example of the ethical refinement of the Planet3 moderator, apparently “AS” in this case.
Here’s the post: “Kaustubh, we can agree that dO-18 in shell calcite is a function of marine temperature and salinity.
“We can also agree that when constructing paleo-temperatures from fossil calcite, direct knowledge of paleo-marine temperature and salinity is not in hand.
“Therefore, one does not know whether any detected change in fossil dO-18 is due to a change in paleo-temperature, or in paleo-salinity, or both.
“But it gets more complicated. Bemis, 1997 discuss the non-equilibrium values of dO-18 in foraminifera, and relate that to impacts of variable symbiont photosynthesis and over-all marine [CO3(2-)]. Photosynthetic activity can vary with both cloudiness and turbidity, as well as nutrient flux.
“Temperature, salinity, photosynthesis, and [CO3(2-)] now represent four variables that enter into foraminiferal calcite dO-18. How does one then isolate a physically clean temperature signal from fossil foram calcite?
“Apart from that, however, the accuracy of a dO-18 measurement depends on more than mass spectrometry. It also depends on the chemical methods used to liberate CO2 from fossil calcite. For example: how much of the O-18 in the CO2 exchanges with O-16 in the water used to process the calcite.
“These variables can impact a dO-18 paleo-temperature reconstruction in unknown ways, and are responsible for the point scatter one sees in the experimental data. Therefore, any paleo-temperature reconstructed from fossil calcite must acknowledge the uncertainty due to the real possibility of confounding environmental variables that are currently invisible to analysis.
“Figure 2 in Bemis, 1997 displays the lines for 10 independent empirical dO-18 paleo-temperature prediction equations. The variation between the lines is far greater than the uncertainty due to measurement scatter about the mean line.
“Bemis Figure 2 shows that a single marine temperature can produce a spread in dO-18 of about 0.8%o. Conversely a predictive spread of about 3.5 C can follow from a single dO-18 value. And this is with known temperatures.
“The empirical spread displayed in Bemis, et al., Figure 2 implies an uncertainty of about (+/-)1.75 C in any reconstructed dO-18 temperature, just based on the spread of the standard empirical equations. This inter-equational uncertainty is in addition to the uncertainty within each equation itself due to the systematic point scatter I described above.
“As the internal measurement errors and the external inter-equational uncertainties stem from independent sets of systematic errors, they combine as the rms: (+/-)sqrt[measurement error)^2+(inter-equational spread)^2] = sqrt[(1.25)^2+(1.75)^2]=(+/-)2.2 C.
“All these variations are real and clearly reflect systematic errors due to unaccounted confounding variables. And those systematic errors have entered into empirical equations derived from studies where the water temperatures and salinities are known.
“I wondered whether paleo-salinity might be independently recoverable from Mg/Ca or Sr/Ca ratios. That might help resolve the confounding of temperature and salinity in fossil calcite. But apparently, that is not a current possibility. See Dodd and Crisp, Nürnberg, et al., and Takesue, et al.
“Kaustubh, as a Ph.D. student, by the time you graduate you will have risen to being a world expert in your field. Attaining that state will require you to learn the field down to the bed-rock, or as close to that as you can get.
“You had plenty of time to write a long essay replying to my initial WUWT comment, but now have no time to write a response to my discussion of the methodological uncertainties that enter into dO-18 temperature reconstructions.
“You should have been already familiar with those uncertainties, because you should have worked thoroughly through the foundational papers. If you were familiar with the methodological problems and their solutions, and knew that the problems I raised had already been solved, and how, you’d have immediately described those solutions, with citations.
“But you didn’t.
“That’s evidence that you don’t know. It’s clear, therefore, that the empirical uncertainties I raised are new to you. You haven’t worked through the papers that underlie your field. And as a consequence, you posted the list of papers as rhetorical iconography rather than as science.
“You must decide what you’re really doing, Kaustubh. Are you doing science or are you playing games?
“Doing science means knowing the data and surrendering to the data. The data evidently don’t support precise dO-18 temperature reconstructions, even though the physics of equilibrium thermal fractionation of stable isotopes is well-understood. The reasons include methodological error and unaccounted environmental variables.
“There’s no dishonor in uncertainty, because that’s just how things are. It’s no one’s fault. Methodological uncertainties just show where people must focus their attention. The mistake is trying to force the data into pre-set conclusions. At that point, it’s games and not science.
“So which is it going to be for you, Kaustubh? The meaning of your Ph.D. will depend on the choice you make.”
So there it is. An outrage, isn’t it? 🙂
I wrote to Kaustubh as someone thoroughly familiar with experimental science and as someone who has worked with generations of graduate students (~5 yrs/generation). The difference between games and science is obvious to any scientist. A grad student who cites papers as icons of foundational certitude, while clearly not having worked through the contents, is in danger of descent into game playing. I gathered that Kaustubh is about a 2nd year grad student. It’s time for him to begin mastering his discipline, and it seemed constructive to his development into a scientist to impart that as advice.
The post below, in response to this never appeared at all. I can’t imagine why, except maybe the moderator got upset because of the reference to Michael Mann or, perhaps more likely, because of the mention of he who must not be named, followed by a link to his blog.
Whatever the reason, the absent post follows. The “Arthur,” addressee by the way, is apparently a Ph.D. trained physicist who seems to know nothing of Chemistry, or spectroscopy, or the history of either, or even of systematic error analysis.
Anyway … “#11, Arthur, spectroscopic data were approached from theory, not phenomenology, ever since atomic emission lines were explained using the new quantum mechanics in the early 1920’s.
“After that, came its improvements in Chemistry and Physics from valence bond theory, through molecular orbital theory, and in Inorganic Chemistry, crystal field theory, ligand field theory, self-consistent field and X-alpha methods, right through to DFT all of which employed quantum mechanics, and all of which did a good to excellent job explaining absorption and emission spectra.
“Chemistry itself, apart from QM, is thoroughly grounded in atomic theory and Thermodynamics. Those constitute “most of what what chemists do.” Not phenomenology, not statistics, and not “[parametrized] simple models.” You were wrong the first time you claimed Chemistry is based in phenomenology, and you’re still wrong.
Your comments about DFT merely show that you have no appreciation of approximation methods.
“I know physicists and work with them. You don’t write like one, you don’t evidence thinking like one, and you don’t respect science — their professional passion — like one. No matter your training in science, your description of it is impoverished.
No one knows how Michael Mann calculated his 1998/1999 error bars, because he has never released his entire code and has never fully clarified his methods. If you have information to the contrary, then I suggest you contact Steve McIntyre. I’m sure you’d have a fine conversation, i.e., about this, for example.
Monte Carlo methods are useful only for analyzing systems under an assumption of random distribution. That’s hardly useful for assessing systematic error.
“Finally, I have not “[dismissed] paleoclimatology.” I’ve merely pointed out a neglected methodological uncertainty in dO-18 temperature reconstructions.
“That uncertainty obviates any reconstruction of paleo SST at better accuracy than about (+/-)2 C.
“”Idiosyncratic” is your insistent elaboration of misperceptions about science that border on the bizarre.”