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.
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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.