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”.)
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Crash and burn for DeSmog.
Meanwhile, over at The American Spectator, Ross Kaminsky has this:
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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.
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(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.
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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 @ur momisugly 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 @ur momisugly 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.