Notes on the faked Heartland document

The first clue to it being fake ought to have been seen in the fact that the smog hippies started whooping and throwing their crap, prematurely as usual, against the wind.
It paints a hilariously nasty picture though. Butt naked hippie standing in the wind, covered all in crap, with an extra sticky hand going: That’ll show ’em! O_o

Where was Connolley on the day in question?!
[REPLY: Remarks like this are unfounded innuendo. Please refrain. -REP]

Who is this Billy Connolly that everyone keeps mentioning?
Surely not the Billy connolly?
[REPLY: No, you’re thinking of a different one. This is The CONNOLLEY. -REP]

Is anybody really surprised?

[snip – accusation of another individual without evidence, we are well aware though – Anthony]

Alexander L. says:
February 16, 2012 at 12:47 am

Heartland Institute Budget for 2013.
Volunteer Donations: 2.1 million.
Fund-Raising Donations: 3.7 million.
Payments from news outlets after winning in courts: 92.4 million.

Best comment yet on the affair!

A Physicist says: ” …. both scientist and skeptic alike.”
Funny you should say it that way…. why didn’t you instead say “…both true- CAGW believer and scientist alike”? Are you implying that scientists cannot be skeptics… or perhaps insinuating that you believe that 97-98% of scientists believe in CAGW and therefore there are no scientists skeptical of CAGW?

JJ says:
February 16, 2012 at 10:35 am
“Someone scanned a page, and then added invisible text on top of it.”
No, this is what a scan of a document will do. The actual image with its poor quality fonts is held as a picture in one layer, and the scan software attempts to convert the image to text, and holds that text in a separate layer, in order to facilitate searching and copying of text. That has been done rather successfully. I can find only the two convert-to-text errors; they are as follows:
“Our climate work is attractive to flinders,” (should be “funders”)
“AVe have also pledged to help raise” (should be “We have”)
Can somebody try opening the PDF in Photoshop and look at the layers? My old version of Photoshop says the file has errors.

Jimbo says:
February 16, 2012 at 11:23 am
William M. Connolley says:
February 16, 2012 at 10:04 am
> charge that skeptics are “anti-science.”
Heartland certainly are; they are trying to mislead people into thinking that net natural fluxes of CO2 are greater than human fluxes.
References?

Wikipedia 😉

A recap so far:

A. Scott says:
February 16, 2012 at 1:46 am
Keith Kloor claims to have been forwarded the original email accompanying the documents from the “insider/leaker”:
He posts the wording from that “cover” email:

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.
What is MOST interesting is what they recommend be checked out – the “fundraising and budget documents, the information about donors, and compare to the 2010 990 tax form”

What seems MUCH more interesting is what it does the it does not say, or should I say reference.

What is missing is any mention by the emailer of the “Strategy” document – which is the KEY document in the bunch … yet he says nothing about it.
Then comes the crowd sourced forensic evidence coming out
1. The extensive and detailed “style” commentary of those like Megan McCardle
2. The detailed document data, including, PDF version difference from other PDF’s, and the scanner time zone coding:

Berényi Péter says:
February 16, 2012 at 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.

3. The “location” info for all of the deSmog blog participants being on the West Coast and in the Pacific time zone:

Glenn says:
February 16, 2012 at 1:27 am
Desmogblog.com and boys all hang in Vancouver – Pacific Standard Time.
John Lefebvre, Richard Littlemore, James Hoggan
Brendan DeMelle lives in Seattle
One of their close buds, John Mashey, lives in California.

4. The PDF creator info comparing the Strategy document with another unrelated document created by deSmog blog and finding an exact match:

TerryS says:
February 16, 2012 at 6:07 am
Curiously, the XMP toolkit used to generate the fake pdf was:
“Adobe XMP Core 5.2-c001 63.139439, 2010/09/27-13:37:26 ”
The XMP toolkit used to create one of the elements of desmog-fracking-the-future.pdf was:
“Adobe XMP Core 5.2-c001 63.139439, 2010/09/27-13:37:26 ”
I am not drawing any conclusions about this, just pointing out the coincidence.

5. Perhaps the best/closest to the “smoking gun” – Megan McCardles discovery that the Koch contribution to Heartland was SPECIFICALLY for Health Care not CLIMATE – as clearly shown in the evidence

Update: Koch says that their contribution was for health care, not global warming …And indeed, when you look at the fundraising document, the coding next to Koch’s donation is “HCN” which certainly seems to be their health care code–other donors with that code include Bayer, Amgen, EliLilly, and GlaxoSmithKline ….that seems to clinch it–why would health care donations show up in their climate strategy report? Unless of course, it was written by someone who doesn’t know anything about facts of the donation, but does know that the Kochs make great copy.

6.The “unique identifier” meta info – which may yield further clues:

Berényi Péter says:
February 16, 2012 at 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 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

Brian H says:
February 16, 2012 at 6:18 am
The smoking gun: “I propose that at this point it be kept confidential and only be distributed to a subset of Institute Board and senior staff.”
… To the contrary, it was almost certainly crafted by someone who has never served or interacted with a Board of Directors.

I completely agree with Brian. This memo was clearly written by someone who purposefully intends to set up an incendiary situation, a huge mistake that anyone with professional etiquette would not risk.
I have several huge red flag issues with this memo. The first echoes what Brian states because it is so glaring. When writing a memo to the Board, one absolutely does not exclude any board member and have the arrogance to state so in writing. The legal ramifications for doing so are enormous. The act is even more egregious when the memo is also directed to senior staff, which is unusual because senior staff are not necessarily the Officers.
Whoever wrote the memo doesn’t seem to understand an Institution’s organization, doesn’t realize the insult created, and ignorantly believes staff and Board members don’t talk with each other. The author intends that the reader believe that every member of the Board wouldn’t have the business sense to demand proper conduct of business. I find that impossible to believe given my experience serving on Non Profit and For Profit Boards. Boards exist to ensure proper conduct of business by virtue of their business experience and almost always include non-Institute members from the business community for unbiased balance. No Board would allow such grievous conduct.
The memo is in the form of a poorly written narrative that is telling the Board what the Institute’s strategies are going to be. This is bass ackwards. The Board counsels on the Institution’s strategies and makes recommendations to its Officers (not senior staff). The Board would already know this information so there is no good reason why the information would be relayed to the board as a confidential disclosure unless the Board is routinely kept in the dark and exists only to play golf. Besides, a Board member already understands that he/she is legally bound to keep all information before the Board strictly confidential. The author doesn’t seem to know this. It appears the so-called confidentiality of the document is for dramatic punctuation and show.
The statement “… and only be distributed to a subset of Institute Board and senior staff.” is very problematic. It should say “to a subset of [Members of the] Institute[‘s] Board [of Directors] and Senior staff. This person is illiterate and hardly someone who would be communicating strategic information to the Board.
The memo lacks proper structure. There’s no salutation and, from my perspective, crass beyond believability. Headers, numbering, indentation, proper paragraph breaks, bullets, and standard business conventions are all absent giving evidence that this person is ignorant about communicating this type of information at a management level.
The author directs the reader to other documents without proper reference as to what details the reader is supposed to understand. There’s no context whatsoever to the direction other than to draw attention to other documents for no stated purpose. Plus, in the logical flow of the memo, it’s out of place giving the appearance that the author didn’t have the time to assemble his/her thoughts coherently.
Seriously, if someone sent me a memo like this, I would be immediately on the phone asking what idiot wrote it and why do they feel it appropriate to blindside Board members over seemingly mundane matters that would normally fall under a Board’s counsel?
This memo is clearly a fake.