Notes on the faked Heartland document

UPDATE: there’s even more evidence that the document was faked. The Koch Foundation and The Atlantic weighs in in update 3 below.

As a follow up to the post Notes on the Heartland Leak, I’ve prepared some notes on the PDF document “2012 Climate Strategy” that Heartland says in their press release is a fake among the other documents distributed. They say specifically that:

One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.

Here is a screencap of the top part of that document, which was printed, and then scanned, unlike any of the other documents which were direct to PDF from word processing programs:

There’s been a lot of scrutiny in comments on various blogs, and I’ve given some scrutiny to the document as well, comparing it with other documents in the set. I’m in agreement that this is a fake, here is why:

1. It is the only document in the set that appears to have been scanned rather than produced by a PDF document publisher such as Adobe Distiller 8.0 or 8.1 which were both in document properties on other documents. For example compare the two document properties side by side. I’ve placed arrows marking distinct differences:

2. The metadata in document properties in the document said to be faked have been sanitized. Why cover tracks? This could possibly be due to the leaker not knowing how to remove other metadata in standard PDF, but knows if he/she scans it on an Epson flatbed scanner and saves it to the scanner’s memory stick/flash drive port, there will be no personally identifiable information.

3. One of the first questions I asked Joe Bast of Heartland when I saw this printed then scanned document was “do you not shred your trash”? His response was, “there’s no need, all the communications are done electronically by email”. That suggests a paper copy never existed in the Heartland office. The fact that none of the documents contains any personal signatures lends credence to this.

4. It doesn’t read like a strategy document, as it mixes strategy with operational details and commentary.

5. It gets the operational details ( budget) wrong – especially the points about my project, rounding up to $90,000 from a very specific budget number of $88,000. This suggests trying to inflate the number for a purpose. There’s no evidence of rounding budget numbers in any other document in the set.

6. Key sentences are rather clumsily written and some make no sense. This contrasts with purposeful language in the other documents. This one sentence in particular has gotten a lot of attention:

His 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.

I can’t imagine pitching “…dissuading teachers from teaching science.” to a board of directors at a meeting. It is a sure recipe for a public relations nightmare.

7. There are punctuation errors throughout it, suggesting it is not a professional document. There’s an overuse of commas for example. The formatting is different than other documents in the set, with a left justified title. All other Heartland documents have a center justified title. Fonts for titles don’t match either. The “2012 Climate Strategy” document has a different font.

8. The “2012 Climate Strategy” is the purported “smoking gun” that provides commentary and context missing from the other factual documents. Without this framing document, the other documents and what they contain, are rather bland. Without it, there’s not much red meat to dangle in front of people that would tear into it.

9. The document misrepresents the positions of Andrew Revkin and Dr. Judith Curry. This seems to come from a point of speculation, not from a point of certainty.

10. Most of the documents were prepared by Joe Bast, listed as author “jbast” in the PDF document metadata and done around 8AM on Monday, January 16th. One document, “Board Directory 01-18-12_0.pdf” has an author “ZMcElrath” ( a Heartland employee according to the Budget document) and was created on Wednesday January 25th at 1:04PM, within working hours just like all the others.

The document in question the “2012 Climate Strategy” has a timestamp of Monday, Feb 13th, at 12:41PM, just one day before “DeSmog Blog” released the documents on their website. The timeline disparity doesn’t make a lot of sense for documents that were supposedly mailed to a person posing as a board member (according to an alleged email snippet on Keith Kloor’s website) to trick someone at Heartland to email them the package of documents. Here it is:

Dear Friends (15 of you):

In the interest of transparency, I think you should see these files from the Heartland Institute. Look especially at the 2012 fundraising and budget documents, the information about donors, and compare to the 2010 990 tax form. But other things might also interest or intrigue you. This is all I have. And this email account will be removed after I send.

It would have had to have been sent sometime between 12:41PM Chicago time on Monday Feb13th and Tuesday Feb 14th 16:39 (Pacific Time) when the first comment appeared on DeSmog Blogs first post on the issue. According to David Appell’s blog, Keith Kloor says it was sent yesterday (Feb 14th), which is after the creation date for the “2012 Climate Strategy” memo of “2/13/2012 12:41:52 PM. Which means DeSmog blog had the documents only a short time.

Appell also writes: Desmogblog Had Leaked Docs For Only an Hour

I guess I’m behind on this, because this afternoon Politico reported that Desmogblog received the documents yesterday (2/14) and “The blog posted them about an hour later without contacting the Heartland Institute for confirmation.”

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=5826D160-4705-4D72-A0BB-44C8C2EDA7DC

So they received them after the suspicious memo was scanned (according to its metadata). Which doesn’t prove its not fake, but at least the timeline isn’t inconsistent.

Appell also thinks the document makeup is suspicious and does his own metadata analysis.

Summary:

All the above evidence, plus Heartland’s statement saying it is a fake, taken in total suggest strongly that the “2012 Climate Strategy” document is a fake. From my perspective, it is almost if the person(s) looking at these said “we need more to get attention” and decided to create this document as the “red meat” needed to incite a response.

Indeed, the ploy worked, as there are now 216 instances (as of this writing) of this document title “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy” on Google at various news outlets and websites.

The question to ask then is this: who benefits the most from the existence of such a document? A disgruntled employee? Hardly. Such things often backfire. And, who would know best how to craft such a document for maximum public impact? I think the answers are there, but the question needs to be asked. From what I hear, Heartland is going for criminal prosecution and/or civil liabilities on this one. They certainly have a case.

All of those news outlets and bloggers that regurgitated this document and the claims in it without checking for the veracity of it first are going to have some defending to do to. The Guardian seems particularly vulnerable for their “publish first, ask questions later” tactic.

UPDATE: At Lucia’s Blackboard, commenter Duke C. have been delving into the faked memo. What he has found is quite interesting:

Duke C. (Comment #89877)

February 15th, 2012 at 9:55 pm

Steve McIntyre (Comment #89815)

February 15th, 2012 at 4:31 pm

If you look at the Document Properties of the various Heartland documents, the Confidential Memo has a date of Feb 13, 2012 whereas the other documents date from January. In addition, the agenda source (for example) refers to a p: drive and an origin in a *.wpd document, while the Confidential Memo does not have these features.

The Confidential Strategy Memo and the Form 990 were both scanned, possibly from the same source. There are similarities in the Metadata. Both were created under PDF Version 1.5, with the same Extensible Metadata Platform Core:

xmlns:x=”adobe:ns:meta/” x:xmptk=”Adobe XMP Core 5.2-c001 63.139439, 2010/09/27-13:37:26

The other 6 pdfs show a different core version:

xmlns:x=”adobe:ns:meta/” x:xmptk=”Adobe XMP Core 4.0-c316 44.253921, Sun Oct 01 2006 17:14:39

The Form 990 linked at DeSmog shows August 02, 2011 as the last modified date. The 990 linked at Heartlandinstitute.org shows December 06, 2011. Scanning artifacts indicate that both are identical.

All of this is, of course, circumstantial evidence. but I’m not ready to rule out that the Strategy memo wasn’t scanned at Heartland.

================================================

Duke C. (Comment #89887)

February 15th, 2012 at 11:03 pm

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dogparliament

February 16, 2012 2:13 am

The package was worth far more to news agencies with the forged letter. Maybe the bad fake was added just to make a quick buck for the seller? If the seller was guananteed anonymity and the content was accepted on face value with no possibiity for repatation, the culprit may be smarter than we thought.

Lucy Skywalker

February 16, 2012 2:23 am

This leak fake seems like another ten-ten red button moment.
Comparison with Climategate:
1a: CG emails were as Mosh says held to be fake until proven true
1b: Heartland doco held to be true… but overwhelming evidence of fakery.
2a: Anthony’s project is to make good basic info available for warmists as well as skeptics
2b: CG emails confirm intent to rig the peer-review process
3: Warmist funding is one or two orders of magnitude greater than skeptics funding
News of WMC: as he says, up to his old tricks (reverts being his speciality)
Mann’s report from the trenches @ur momisugly Amazon:
Two-tail reviews stats, 44@ur momisugly5, 7@ur momisugly4, 0@ur momisugly3, 2@ur momisugly2, 13@ur momisugly1 stars
“Most helpful” 5-star liked by 165 out of 186
“Most helpful” 1-star liked by 148 out of 405
jonny old boy, maybe best @ur momisugly1-star but cannot spell and got 8 in 76 – one in nine
most @ur momisugly1-star were short and dismissive, poor quality compared with the 5-star reviews
No 1-star review took the 5-star reviews intelligently to the cleaners.
Conclusions: there is still a lot of work to do, to re-establish good science, and it starts here with us. Also imho we need to clearly, continually distance ourselves from hate merchants that threaten life attack, such as Mann etc imply – and of course doesn’t say that this side has the same problem. IMHO a sidebar note at WUWT to this effect would help. It would be a kind of counterpoise to the kind of sidebar notes seen at SkSci

Jimbo

February 16, 2012 2:40 am

Stephen says:
February 16, 2012 at 1:57 am
Anthony, the key point in these emails is you are being paid a substantial amount of money to write a skeptic blog from an institution that receives a considerable amount of oil money. Is this true or not?

You forgot to put SARC at the end? If not then not $44,000 is not a lot of money compared to M. Manns $1.9 million single grant. The money to Watts was not to write a skeptic blog but intended to scientific purposes.

Lucy Skywalker

February 16, 2012 2:41 am

Stephen says: February 16, 2012 at 1:57 am
Anthony, the key point in these emails is you are being paid a substantial amount of money to write a skeptic blog from an institution that receives a considerable amount of oil money. Is this true or not?
Not true If you read here carefully you will discover that
(1) Anthony has to date received zilch or near-zero from big oilers or their beneficiaries
(2) the proposed funding from CEI was for a specific project ie making basic NOAA info comprehensible for both warmists and skeptics ie a public service that NOAA themselves should be giving
(3) Anthony works hard to check his facts before publication, unlike his detractors here.

Dale

February 16, 2012 2:54 am

I’ve worked in a number of large organisations, in middle-senior management positions.
The fact is, any manager would be mortified to have this memo sent to Board members.
This, quite simply is NOT how you address the Board of your employer.
The technical stuff just seals the deal. :p

A physicist

February 16, 2012 3:00 am

A physicist posted:
It seems to me that a primary duty of scientist and skeptic alike — a duty that we owe most especially to our children and grandchildren, who will inherit the planet that we are creating — is to provide the strongest skeptical analysis in regard to the strongest scientific theories and observations.
That is why focusing weak skeptical “gotchas” on weak “not even wrong” science amounts to a dereliction of duty to future generations. And basing weak “gotchas” on illegally obtained, out-of-context, dubious-provenance documents is just plain disgraceful.
No matter who does it, stolen-document “gotchas” are just plain wrong. Everyone should appreciate the harm that comes from this practice, condemn it absolutely, and foreswear it utterly, both scientist and skeptic alike.

It is mighty dismaying (to me) that of many hundreds of WUWT posts on the ClimateGate/HeartlandGate affairs, not even one other WUWT poster has agreed with this common-sense principle.
Abandoning the rational analysis of sobering scientific findings, and focusing instead on politics-first “gotchas”, is just plain foolish, plain wrong, and a plain dereliction of duty, no matter whether that “gotcha” focus comes from climate-change believers or from climate-change skeptics.

Berényi Péter

February 16, 2012 3:00 am

Here is full meta info for file “2012 Climate Strategy.pdf” as given by *N*X utility pdfinfo, version 0.12.4. The only major difference compared to Anthony’s analysis is it says PDF version was 1.4 (instead of 1.5). I reckon a plaintext command line utility is more reliable in this respect, than any fancy GUI thingy.
However, we also have some more shards of info there. First we may notice time zone of “EPSON Scan” was “-08:00”, which is PST (Pacific Standard Time). From this we can guess the jurisdiction. We also know, that “Monday, February 13, 2012, 12:41:52 PM” is actually 2012-02-13 04:41:52 UTC (unixtime 1329108112). The file was posted on desmogblog at 2012-02-14 05:14:22 UTC.
The other thing is uuid‘s (universally unique identifiers) found in meta info, which are supposed to be universally unique after all. I am talking about these codes:
DocumentID: 0d826409-6a19-411c-ae09-b5f400186c52
InstanceID: 692440ef-d85e-4cec-afef-742d339ece7b
A don’t really know if they had any forensic value or not. A PDF guy out there perhaps?

Mike M

February 16, 2012 3:04 am

Liars become very frustrated when people stop believing them so I expect more and more vile acts of desperation. On the bright side though, the fact that they are resorting to them is one more bellwether of the truth winning out, (and at a very small fraction of the cost of the lie as well).
To the person who created this fake and might be reading these words, I’m sorry that maybe your mother and father never loved you or whatever but attempting to take it out on the rest of the world will never change that or comfort your tortured soul. Such things will only increase your burden of guilt to point that, hopefully, you realize there are only two possible outcomes, the guilt eventually crushes you or you cast it off before it can. The latter is your only way out but desiring to know how to do that is a first step that only you can decide to take. Such is the nature of free will.

The Pompous Git

February 16, 2012 3:06 am

Aynsley Kellow said @ur momisugly February 16, 2012 at 12:54 am

Pompous Git: There are a few of us at UTas who celebrate scepticism. 🙂

Yes, I know. Sad isn’t it? The “just a few” qualifier I mean. From a very selfish POV, I thought getting rid of Phil Dow was an act of complete insanity.

Otter

February 16, 2012 3:13 am

willie Connolley~ We eagerly await your Wikipedia article on this.
Oh, wait….

Steve Brown

February 16, 2012 3:15 am

The 2012 climate strategy is a clear fake… to all the points above add that the one scanned document which is the IRS form wasn’t scanned by an Epson scanner.
Desperate attempt to make a story where there isn’t one…
The headline “Lobbying organisation raises money to lobby” is not so interesting

DirkH

February 16, 2012 3:20 am

In the text : “I propose that at this point it be kept confidential…”
But the title of the document is:
“Confidential Memo: …”
It makes no sense to suggest in a confidential memo to keep it confidential. And when something is already classified as confidential, this is in general not just a suggestion. Also, you don’t write “confidential” in the title when it is NOT classified as confidential.
It’s laughably incoherent.
And besides, the text sounds like the forger dreams of writing the script for a James Bond movie, not like a memo.

Jimbo

February 16, 2012 3:21 am

Rich Muller’s BEST project was partly funded by the Koch brothers. Where is the condemnation?????
Does anyone know how much BEST got from Koch.

A. Scott

February 16, 2012 3:32 am

Stephen on February 16, 2012 at 1:57 am said:
Anthony, the key point in these emails is you are being paid a substantial amount of money to write a skeptic blog from an institution that receives a considerable amount of oil money. Is this true or not?

typical of the mindless trolls – cannot be bothered to research the most basic facts before making silly attacks
The answer is false- not that I imagine you truly care. It has been thoroughly noted that Anthony is NOT being paid to write a skeptic blog.
He HAS successfully obtained a grant from an individual donor, arranged by Heartland, to fund a project to provide easy access to the public to new NOAA temp data.
And if you actually read the Heartland documents before coming here and looking silly, perhaps you could share just where the alleged massive oil co funding for Heartland is shown in their budget?

Otter

February 16, 2012 3:52 am

Apologies, had to open Firefox in order to place a comment, and put it on the wrong thread. But the sentiment is still valid!

Isonomia

February 16, 2012 3:56 am

Well … that’s ruined my day. I thought I would have a fun day commenting on a few misguided blogs, but as far as I can see this “deniergate” has Richard Black (denialist in chief) so calls it has completely fizzled out … except for a few loan tweeters …. whose comments were so inspiring I spontaneously yawned.
I suppose that is the benefit of being part of a multi-billion industry … you’ve got plenty of lawyers and PR consultants to rein in the idiot journalists.

Konrad

February 16, 2012 4:01 am

Nick Stokes says:
February 16, 2012 at 2:09 am
Heartland say all sorts of crimes have been committed, so presumably they’ll call in the police. Maybe that will get the answer.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////
Nick, get over yourself. Your side obviously created the false “strategy” memo. They did so crudely and stupidly. Do you think the Biased Broadcasting Cabal or the Leftardian like being made to look stupider than they can reasonably avoid? The late Hunter S had a rule about misbehaviour in Vegas “Don’t burn the locals”. Your side just burnt the locals…..

Isonomia

February 16, 2012 4:04 am

A. Scott says:
And if you actually read the Heartland documents before coming here and looking silly, perhaps you could share just where the alleged massive oil co funding for Heartland is shown in their budget?
Something tells me that in the long run, that is going to be the real story!
Now as a sceptic, I will not discount the possibility that this was a put up job by the heartland institute to discredit both the journalists and their knee jerk printing of this kind of rubbish AND those who continually link scepticism with oil.
But … well … deniergate now stands for black propaganda and poor journalism which blows up in the face of biased reporters leading people to precisely the opposite conclusion to that they intended … that far from being massively oil funded, the heartland institute is a rather modest affair with little if any oil money.

Jimbo

February 16, 2012 4:05 am

Sierra Club $26,000,000 (from natural gas interests alone)

The Sierra Club disclosed Thursday that it received over $26 million from natural-gas giant Chesapeake Energy Corp. between 2007 and 2010 to help the group’s campaign against coal-fired power plants.

This is indeed a well funded fossil fuel lobbying industry.
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/208477-sierra-club-took-26m-from-gas-industry-to-fight-coal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126135534799299475.html
What the Heartland story has revealed to many is the unequal funding. Warmists will wish they never promoted the story so hard.

Jimbo

February 16, 2012 4:08 am

Sorry I forgot to add extra zeros. I meant:
Sierra Club $26,000, 000 (from natural gas interests alone)

Eric (skeptic)

February 16, 2012 4:10 am

Along the lines of Lucy Skywalker, I give the faked document a two star review. For starters nobody starts with “Confidential Memo”. They would say Strategic Thrusts for 2012 (Confidential), or they would add “not for release” or “controlled release” if it is only sent to certain donors. The middle of the document is an uninspiring cribbing from the legit documents; poorly written and with obvious intent to blur the facts a little to make this document sound strategeric. The end of the document is a giveaway: name dropping like Curry who is hardly known or popular with anybody outside of the rabid geeks (on both sides) who post at her site. And Watts? With all due respect, nobody has any clue who Watts is. That ending just reeks of a hater who spends way too much time on the alarmist blogs.

AdderW

February 16, 2012 4:10 am

The “fake” document isn’t a fake per se, it is just taken out of context …
/snort
This is a badly orchestrated attempt of creating a “deniar-gate”, sad really, they have lost the plot.

Eric (skeptic)

February 16, 2012 4:14 am

A physicist, I agree. Climategate should be for amusements purposes only.

Anteros

February 16, 2012 4:18 am

Fakegate.
Its OK, but it does sound a bit like face-ache.
Still, I’ve been laughing myself hoarse at the sight of Richard Black piling in with both smearing, sneering guns blazing, only to come up with vast piles of egg on his face. The irony is even greater in that he posted his hate-piece after the document was pronounced fake….

Isonomia

February 16, 2012 4:40 am

Konrad says:
… misbehaviour in Vegas “Don’t burn the locals”. Your side just burnt the locals…..
Surely, if we are to be properly sceptical, we should consider the possibility that this was a put up job by the heartland institute? … Which would presuppose that they intended it to be shown to be a forgery … but with the intention of getting the rest of the information to be published by the gullibles.
That tends to make me think there would be some smoking gun like a UK timezone inserted so as to ensure that no one could mistake it for a legitimate document …. but then that is what you would expect, so perhaps they might be cleaverer and just make it so blindingly obvious that its forged that anyone with an open mind would recognise it for such.
Cock-up or conspiracy … looks to me that even when there are conspiracies, cock up seems to be the dominant force!

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