An online and open exercise in stylometry/textometry: Crowdsourcing the Gleick "Climate Strategy Memo" authorship

This is hilarious.

DeSmog is DeSperate

Rude: No dice, Glieck implies he got the memo separately, from an anonymous source, by snail mail. Very convenient, no?

Rudebaeger, I bet the strategy doc isn’t one of the ones sent, why would they scan the document, none of the others are scanned images.

Actually the bits that are left above the redaction on the first page could be enough of a fingerprint to match up a header to. Maybe.

Got my second treatment to stop me going blind today so I may have a few hours spare this afternoon as I sit in a darkend room.
Then again it being the NHS my appointment was 3 hours late last time so that spare time I talked about probably will be a pocket full of dreams.

I like The Registers description of DeSmog blog.

A publication run by a Canadian PR firm which lists various green businesses and organisations among its clients, also funded in part by convicted online-gambling payments kingpin and hippie biz tycoon John Lefebvre.

I am very much looking forward to the court case where Gleick presents the “original” memo as evidence.
Today thanks to a nifty government program called Echelon most printers(at least those from HP, Xerox, Dell, Canon, Epson, Lexmark, amongst others now imbed microscopic code on everything they print. A Forensic Science team will be able to look at the Gleick’s memo and will be able to tell the printer it came from without much difficulty.
My money is it coming from Gleick’s very own Epson Printer, the same one he used to scan the document.

Mike Mann: “Evaluation shows “Faked” Heartland Climate Strategy Memo is Authentic ”
____________________________
Agreed; it’s an authentic fake.

ummm… Mr Mann, your trench is already well over 6ft deep !! !!

Given the nature of Gleick’s usual “unburnished” literary style, I suspect that almost all of his efforts which have made it into print have been subjected to a rigorous editing process to polish his rather crude prose.
I am not convinced of the validity of this experiment, although I remain amused by the hilarity!
I would also remind everyone, before they make any definitive statements that may come back to haunt them, that despite all the speculation there is still no definitive proof of the authorship of the fake. Or, dare I say it, absolute proof that it is a fake.
Let us be careful not to lose the high ground.

I may be way off the mark here but isn’t DeSmogBlog funded by a convicted money launderer by the name of John Lefebvre?

“Two former directors and founding shareholders of NETeller Plc, a British online money transfer company, have been charged in the United States with laundering billions of dollars in illegal gambling proceeds.
Canadians Stephen Lawrence, 46, and John Lefebvre, 55, were arrested on Monday — Lawrence in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Lefebvre in Malibu, California — U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia said.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/01/16/us-crime-neteller-idUSN1622302920070116

http://www.taxabletalk.com/tag/neteller/
http://www.populartechnology.net/2011/04/truth-about-desmogblog.html
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2008/02/01/blog-funder-guilty-money-laundering

Hi,
Just found something interesting – the Fake they point to in the article you link to is different to the original.
The original had a modification and creation time as 2012-02-13T12:41:52-08:00. the ‘new’ fake (with ‘(3)’ on the end) has a modification time as 2012-02-14T12:36:20-08:00 (same original creation time) and is slightly shorter… Is this PDF meant to be the ‘original’ as leaked – if so, why the change? Also the time zone offset is -8 which is West coast..
Maybe nothing – just seem interesting why the change in the pdf at all.

Evaluation shows “Faked” Heartland Climate Strategy Memo is Authentic bit.ly/y0Z7cL – Retweeted by Michael E. Mann

If this gets to court we may find out whether the “Evaluation” is correct.
Fake but real.
Cold but warm.
This is what I call living in denial; desperate, desperate stuff indeed.

I suspect that the forged document was produced shortly before it was scanned – after the receipt of the stolen emailed documents. In fact, because where it fits it fits too well, it would have been very difficult to forge without the emailed documents to hand. If, contrary to my suspicion, the original forged document was in fact mailed at some stage it would almost certainly have been folded. I wonder if one of our forensically minded IT expert readers could have a close look at the scan and tell us whether there is any indication that the original document from which it was copied was folded prior to the scan?

Does Gleick’s version of the story allow TIME for anyone else to have written the “strategy memo”? I haven’t followed the details but his version seems to go like:
1. Mysterious Insider obtains strategy memo, puts it in the mail.
2. Gleick receives, decides to investigate, tricks Heartland into sending board documents.
3. Heartland emails documents, Gleick spends a week or two reading them.
4. Only then does Gleick scan the original memo, and spreading the combined package.
If that original memo shares literal text with the real documents, how did that happen? Let’s say it’s not coincidence. So… maybe the memo was the source for the board documents. Clearly it wasn’t written to be, or the “dissuade teachers from teaching science” slur wouldn’t have been there. And why did the shared text stay unchanged throughout the editing process when everything else changed so much? Why are some parts of such a sloppily-edited memo suddenly of boardroom quality? And shouldn’t the memo have other usable details that weren’t incriminating but would have been removed in editing anyway? It seems unlikely.
So assuming all that, the memo was written based on the board documents. HOW OLD are those board documents? Was there really time for an insider to read them and distill them into that memo, and for the mail system to deliver them to Gleick by the time he says he got it? Clearly Gleick would have had time to write the memo after he got the finished board documents, but does the timeline of his version of the story fit?

Why did’nt he keep the packaging with the postmark and date stamp? Hardly conclusive evidence, obviously, but it would have been at least circumstantial support for his version of events.
Secondly, in the time between the alleged receipt and “going fishing”, he would surely have talked to a few confidantes who would be able to corroborate his story. Like so much else, it defies credibility and reason that he would keep such news entirely to himself and then act as he did.

Good practice would suggest that you give the software an equal number of stories from a wide variety of authors in as similar domains and formats as possible. Make it as hard as possible for the software.
I mean, if you put in 19 Gleick rants and one poem by Kahlil Gibran, then offer the fake memo as a test, the answer is obvious but unenlightening.
And if you’re collecting material from web posts, be sure to snip quoted material from other sources.

Important thing to note before speculating recent manipulation of the files.
file name like “2010_IRS_Form_990 (2).pdf ” are often created by software like Firefox when a second download is done that would overwrite an existing file.
On linux based systems that files can be checked for being identical by the ‘diff’ command.
If diff outputs nothing , they are identical, otherwise is will show differences if possible else just state that they differ.
It would be well within the style of SmogBlog to be trying prevent such analysis as is being done here by “tidying up” the docs.
If there are differences I’m sure enough people here have untainted copies.

Anthony,have you & your readers seen this, The Truth About DeSmogBlog
I’m shocked I tells ya, shocked!… Not
PS It takes one to know one, neh!

Barry Woods quoted Gleick as follows:
“I personally perceived your participation in exchanges in the fall when I ran out of patience with any chance of rational discussion with WUWT, Bishop Hill, or the regular tweeters and bloggers of that group. It became clear it was an unproductive time sink with a group whose minds were closed to fact, and whose primary tool was ad hominem attack. The systematic and coordinated and dishonest attack on me after my negative review of LaFramboise’s book was only one example that made it clear that rational debate was not possible and dissenting views not tolerated. The fact that WUWT blocked me from adding comments more than a year ago to his routinely biased and often dissembling blog further convinced me that there was little interest in discussion among that group.”
————————————————————————-
The primary tool of WUWT and Bishop Hill is ad hominem attack? The contributors’ minds are ‘closed to fact’? Gleick must have been reading slightly distorted mirror sites that are not available to the rest of us. Bizarre.
He then goes on to claim that he was ‘blocked’ from WUWT, which Anthony and his mods assure us is not true. Apart from their respective reputations for veracity, it is difficult to imagine why Gleick would be blocked, given the rules which state that it is how you behave, not who you are, that govern access. Connolly is freebasing all over another thread as I type – why does Gleick imagine that he was singled out for exclusion?
The recurring themes of grandiosity and paranoia illustrated by Barry’s post help us to comprehend how Gleick saw no inconsistency between his public role as the ethics guru and the private person who would do ‘whatever it takes.’ He is just like the family values politicians and evangelical preachers who are eventually exposed as hypocrites. In one of John Le Carre’s spy novels, there is a telling comment on criteria used for recruitment – along the lines that the last thing they wanted was someone who spewed hatred for Communism. They said: if he hates it that much, he’s half in love with it already (my paraphrase).

Interesting idea; it will be fun to see what happens. So far, we have 42 content free comments (43 now) but no-one shows any inclination to actually do the work.

Great idea Anthony.
So far, though the sheer volume of it is remarkable, most of the actual, specific evidence for Gleick authorship of the fake document has been of the subjective variety. (Tone, grammatical idiosyncrasies, out of place mentions of things that matter to Gleick and few others: himself, Forbes, Taylor, etc.) It’s enough that I’m confident he’s the author, but there’s nothing yet that “proves” it.
It would be a win to gather additional “hard” evidence in a more rigorous, methodical fashion… more scientifically. So, on that note, all I’d ask “the crowd” is to please treat this like any other piece of scientific research… be disciplined, objective, consider all the evidence, don’t jump to conclusions, and if you findings happen to point away from Gleick, consider it an obligation to report those findings as well.
Gleick first caved and gave a partial confession when the evidence pointing to him began to accumulate. There’s a good chance that he or his accomplices throw in the towel when the evidence becomes overwhelming and they realize they can’t possibly win.

To make this a crowdsourcing exercise, we have to compile a huge archive. Not only of Gleick’s texts but of tens, even hundreds of other people. One has to compile a set of docs from Mann, one from Jones, one from Trenberth etc.
And to make this the right way, we also have to compile similar sets from McIntyre, Willis, Pielke, you name it.
People should write here, whose texts they’ll collect. The texts have to be copy-pasted as txt-files and the whole material has to be collected at one central place.

There is definitely more to this than meets the eye.
There are 4 documents that have multiple versions:
(1-15-2012) 2012 Heartland Budget here and here
2010_IRS_Form_990 here and here
2012 Climate Strategy here and here
Binder1 here and here
The actual content of the different versions is the same but they are different documents. The modifications time of the latest versions have changed to Feb 14 2012 from their original values.

Mr Connolley, you’re a software designer, aren’t you? Obviously as an IT guru, you’ve an advantage over many here. Instead of issuing cheap potshots, howsabout you pitch in on this and show us if you can actually manage a simple research project? Given your track record here, it’s not like you have too many things to do, people to see, etc.

@Bill
“As Mosher pointed out, if the text copied from the other Heartland documents is not removed, the software will say that Heartland wrote it. If you do take out those lines, the folks at DeSmog can criticize the results as you using an edited document. It still might be interesting though.”
My recommendation is that you do NOT take anything out, but rather go paragraph by paragraph through the strategy memo. This should yield paragraphs which align with the real HI documents (i.e. cut and paste), and other paragraphs which may point to another author (our forger).
If someone really has time go through sentence by sentence. My caution though is that in order to quell critics, you must eventually scan the WHOLE document for attribution.

I have written the following to BBC’s Richard Black on twitlonger. I doubt that he will even read it, let alone respond, But I had to get it off my chest.
“Have you no shame?
The Climate Alarmist’s reasoning as to the fake document in the fakegate leak actually being genuine, would be similar to me not having a driving licence, and stealing one from someone else with the same name as me and claiming, “of course I must have passed my driving test, I have a driving licence to prove it. And look, the information on it is mostly true, and I always believed I could drive anyway, so combining all these matters I guess I can legally drive now!”
The document which YOU claim proves that the Heartland Institute is attacking education is a FAKE! Can you understand that?
You are crudely and unsuccessfully and dishonestly passing off FAKED information gained through deception and lies as “news” and expecting us to believe you.
By all means, write whatever lie based rubbish you like for the likes of the Guardian or Greenpeace, but DO NOT do that on the BBC!
I cannot believe ANYTHING you write ever again, for you are NOT a journalist in ANY rational meaning of the word. You are nothing more than a very overly privileged advocate and activist for a political cause. NOTHING MORE!
Have the decency to apologise, resign from the BBC and go work for the Gutter press where you belong.
At least I support the side of the debate which still supports, truth, honesty, empirical evidence, the full and strict adherence to the FULL tenets of the scientific method, freedom and openness of research and opinion, acceptance and WELCOMING of scientific debate.
How can you look yourself in the face knowing that you are on the side which supports criminality, lies, fraud, fakery, deception, bullying, keeping secret publicly funded research, the hiding of inconvenient data, misrepresentation of data, the bullying of editors and the threats to journals to supinely cave in to the oppression by advocates of a political agenda, the imposition of “acceptable” thought upon everyone, regardless of the weakness and error-filled level of research.
Your follow up on your BBC blog fails to address your negligence and complicity in passing off fraudulently obtained and faked information as accurate news, nor does it address your stark double standard in suppressing the climate gate emails for two weeks and then when that news broke internationally, your blatantly biased defence of the CRU at UEA, and your attacking the leak (or theft as you described it, without ANY evidence whatsoever to back up that serious allegation).
And the difference in this fakegate case in your immediate rush to publication of what you called “leaked” information from an “insider” and then your attacking the VICTIM of this fraudulent theft and defended the thief!
You FAILED to point out the difference between the Heartland being a private organisation which is not subject to FOIA requests, and the climate gate leaks happening largely because that data had already been subject to a FOIA request and the people at CRU ILLEGALLY withheld that public data. NOR did you point out another crucial difference in that ALL the climategate data-leaks were of GENUINE data. NONE of it faked or edited, whereas the FAKEGATE data contained damning information which was ENTIRELY FAKE! It now appears POSSIBLE that you obtained the news of this fakegate theft firsthand from Peter Gleick himself. IF that is the case, then you are guilty of being an accessory to the crime and then deliberately and wilfully misleading, (lying) to the BBC Audience about the information coming from an “insider” you knew Peter Gleick was not an “insider” of the Heartland Institute when you wrote BOTH of your misleading articles about this theft.
Do the decent thing and resign! “

There is plenty of proof and it is being ignored and denied. Additional proof will be denied. Spending time trying to prove something is not only wasted – it will be twisted by them to some new message.

Laughably, the Penn State sabbaticalized Dr. Mike Mann accepted it uncritically.
Twitter / @DeSmogBlog: Evaluation shows “Faked” H …
Evaluation shows “Faked” Heartland Climate Strategy Memo is Authentic bit.ly/y0Z7cL – Retweeted by Michael E. Mann
—
From someone who KNOWS something about “fake but authentic” [heh]!

correction: codification time should be modification time

Cross posted from the Bishop’s Palace
PS – My original idea is wrong too – copying and pasting a file into the same place renames it to “xx Copy” and then if you do it again it becomes “xx Copy (2)” – there is a slight difference between XP and 7 between the names but the word “Copy” is inserted into the new file name.
As you were 😉

Alex at 04:54PT is right– the only way this is fully explained is when HI sues Gleicker and conducts discovery, such that Gleicker must produce (under penalty for pergury) the snail-mail envelope and produce his printer for testing. That said this group inquiry this weekend should be fun and surprisingly productive– hey, “Pajamas Media” was born 7 years ago when CBS/Dan Rather pulled the TANG nonsense. I’m sure warmists will want to participate to show that the forgery is “authentic”

@Bill and everyone else,
Ok finally had a chance to look at the documentation for JGAAP and I don’t believe it will actually be necessary to decompose the memo into paragraphs or sentences. It looks like the LDA and both of the SVM algorithms do this automatically and assign attribution to sections of the document.
So for individuals wanting to give this a go, I’d suggest using those algorithms first.

Here’s some material from the Pacific Institute site, written while the Fakegate plot was being hatched:
Dear Friends,
There’s a Los Angeles Times clipping from 1993 hanging on the wall at our Oakland office: “Study Forecasts Ill Effects of Possible Warming Trend.” That story was about a groundbreaking Pacific Institute study on climate change. The Pacific Institute turns 25 this year, a striking milestone. We have led the call to put climate change mitigation and adaptation into action; we have put the human right to water on the global agenda and water conservation and efficiency into local policy; we tackle environmental and human health with local communities and social responsibility with multinational corporations and the United Nations, and our influence continues to grow. Celebrating a quarter century is a time to assess how the Institute’s efforts to produce innovative, influential research and to get it into the right hands are changing things! I invite you to share this celebration with us each month and see both where we’ve been and where we’re going. This is just the beginning…
Peter Gleick
President and Co-founder
Pacific Institute
Standing Up to Editorial Bias on Climate Science – Peter Gleick Writes, Thousands Respond
On January 27, Pacific Institute President Peter Gleick responded to the op-ed piece “No Need to Panic about Global Warming” published in The Wall Street Journal, which claimed climate change was not occurring. In his Forbes blog post, Dr. Gleick said, “The most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of The Wall Street Journal in [the climate sceince] field is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered to The Wall Street Journal, and were turned down.” That letter was subsequently published in Science magazine.
Responses from Dr. Gleick’s post by climate scientists, environmental activists and organizations, and the public have been remarkable — sparking investigations of the sixteen scientists who signed the op-ed submitted to the WSJ; dozens of editorial pieces in prominent publications and by organizations such as The Huffington Post, Catholic Alliance for the Common Good, The New York Times Dot Earth Blog, The Australian, Media Matters, and Climate Progress debunking the WSJ’s flawed and misleading arguments about climate science; and thousands of comments and conversations on blogs, social media outlets, and forums on the current climate dialog in the media. Later that week, The Wall Street Journal implicitly acknowledged their “climate goof” by accepting a letter from 38 climate scientists, including Peter Gleick, who responded to the WSJ op-ed.
“While much of the opposition to addressing the issue of climate change is political,” Dr. Gleick commented, “it often hides behind pseudo-scientific claims, with persistent efforts to intentionally mislead the public and policymakers with bad science about climate change.”
With efforts by well-funded climate change deniers to sow confusion and delay action by Congress and the public, the Pacific Institute has taken a stand to address climate science misinformation and to push for planning to
prepare for increasingly severe negative impacts of climate change.
-Read Peter Gleick’s blog “Remarkable Editorial Bias on Climate Science at The Wall Street Journal.”
-Read the climate scientists’ Wall Street Journal letter.
-More about climate change.

Changed document numbers ((2), (3)) might have a quite simple explanation: when downloading documents from web (including web-based e-mail) using Windows 7 (and possibly other OS), first instance of the document will be saved with correct title (i.e. filename.doc).
Every time you download the same file after that, W7 will save the file with added number (1), (2), (3) etc. (ie filename (1).doc, filename (2).doc, etc)

Also may want to consider our list of potential authors. At a minimum, I’m including Bast, McElrath, Gleick, and a group that I call HI-unattributed (which includes a scattering of other heartland documents of mixed authorship).
Now to counter criticism that the sample does not include a fair representation of “Lucy Ramirez’s”, I’m also thinking about including Littlemore, DeMelle, and Laden.
We’ll see if it crashes my computer.

How often do climate scientists change the leading in their documents?
How many climate scientists know how to change the leading in their documents?
How many climate scientists know what leading is?
“Leading” is the spacing between lines in a document, actually Microsoft word uses the term “Spacing” and is very cluncky to change.
Another tell is the graphic styling, the style of the fake memo is different than the authentic ones. For instance the fake one uses 16 pt leading and all of the Heartland documents are all 14 pt even when double spaced. Plus there are other graphic styling differences, I point them out here.
http://www.minnesotansforglobalwarming.com/m4gw/2012/02/desmogbloggate.html
If anybody has access to any documents produced by Gleick’s send it to me and I can analyze it.

Re: Ferdinand Emgelbeen

if you receive several times a document by mail with the same title, a mail program automatically adds (2), (3),… to the latest version

The mail program will not change either the modification time or the Instance UUID contained in the meta data of the PDFs. You can rename the file to whatever you like, the meta data will remain the same.
Gleick only sent the documents out once and deleted the mailbox he sent it from so there should be no possibility of comments or multiple.
If DeSmog has copies of the PDFs that pre-date those sent to the “15” then DeSmog acted in concert with Gleick and are thus claiming to have verified documents they helped to compile.

Berényi Péter said, “Can someone ask Dr. Gleick for a better scan of the memo he has allegedly got by snail mail? 2012 Climate Strategy.pdf is an awful B&W scan of pretty low quality….I suppose he still has the original in his possession. Also, he may publish a high resolution scan of the envelope the memo was sent in.”
Ha! That’s funny, Mr Berényi. Anthony’s current venture has no doubt caused Dr Gleick to freak again and so has no doubt misplaced / spring cleaned-away / accidentally eaten or otherwise lost the habeas documenti. I’m betting too that his laptop was stolen or was inadvertantly put by someone in his fridge whereupon the powerful fridge magnets regretfully wiped out his hard drive. Or, perhaps it was a solar magnetic storm. Yeah, that’s the ticket; a solar forcing.
Paging Mr Connolley ! You seemed so impatient earlier on. Come on now Sir, show us lazy peons how to run a proper document analysis. An aggressive, hyper-active Alpha male like you should have had it done, published and peer-reviewed by now.

They are almost forcing Heartland Institute to takes steps which will force Dr. Gleick to testify under oath. Then lying will be a felony for which he would likely serve time–the justice system cannot allow perjury to go unpunished. If Dr. Gleick is forced to admit that he forged the key document, DeSmogBlog will be exposed as what we already know they are.

My analysis said: “IT”S A COOK BOOK”!!

Good one, Mr Hardy Cross! The word subset certainly appears frequently enough. We all become enamoured of certain words or terms and use them heavily. Now some may say that the software is configged to spot such repetition, but one can’t be always sure, as we use many words over and over again and the programmers may not have been able to design for or calibrate for unusual repetitions. Even with our advanced systems, it never hurts to eyball something whenever possible.

Acrobat is made by Adobe, the Adobe Creative Suite comes with Illustrator.
With Illustrator you can open any “unlocked” pdf file (which the Heartland Documents were) and do ANYTHING to that document then simply resave it as a pdf.

@TerryS says:
February 23, 2012 at 5:49 am
“Re: Dave
The significance is that there are 2 DIFFERENT Budget documents, for example.
The document contents are the same but the documents are different. It has nothing to do with how different OS’es handle timestamps. The files sizes are even different.
PDF is not an editable document format. ”
Actually you can, all you need is the right tools.
A pdf analyzer not free but that is able to erase incriminating meta data otherwise pdf files record every byte put into it, even when you have deleted the bytes.
http://www.pdfanalyzer dot com
A free pdf analyzer, however to edit you need to pay
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/PDFAnalyzer.shtml
A list of different tools for pdf and other documents
http://zeltser.com/reverse-malware/analyzing-malicious-documents.html
How to put viruses into pdf
http://www.sudosecure.net/archives/636
Free pdf edit tool
http://www.labnol.org/software/edit-pdf-files/10870/
So, there’s abunch of stuff you can do. :p

Re: _Jim
> Actually, using 3rd party tools they are editable;
Re: MissBrooks
> PDFs are actually (marginally) editable, if you have Acrobat Pro.
And what possible reason is there for DeSmog to employ these tools and modify the PDFs?
I accept that there might well be a perfectly innocent explanation of why DeSmog has 2 different versions of 4 of the files but I can not think of one. Why, for example, would they open the PDFs in an editor?

Is desmog located in Canada or the US? It matters if criminal investigation starts.
I wonder what Suzuki’s links to desmog are. He blogs at HuffyPost, and assumes the fake memo is also genuine (written after Gleick confessed).
David Suzuki: Denying Climate Change is Worse Than Stealing – http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/david-suzuki/documents-strike-at-heart_b_1292343.html

One suggestion on the crowdsourcing — I am not familiar with the tool you use, but analyses like these are subject to both false negatives and false positives. If the tools seems to point to Gleick as a likely author, we are not worried about false negatives. But there is still the problem of false positives. The tool needs to be run against other climate authors to see how they score as authors. If I were a defender of Gleick, and your tool came up with a “positive” match, the first thing I would try to defend my guy is to run the tool against other authors and see if I can get other positives. If they are able to get positives against, say, yourself or even Madonna as authors, that it is going to undermine your results. So I would recommend that you understand the false positive rate of your tool.

Mr Connolley seems to imagine that in the time between late last night and this morning that many of us should have found the time to perform this experiment already. I guess we should have forgone sleep. After all, if we can find the time to spend 30 seconds writing a blog posting, we should have been able to perform this experiment by now.
This cannot possibly be done as quickly as Mr. Connolley seems to think it should be done. Something like this effort will likely require free time over a weekend or something like that. Counting the number of posts which occur before the first results are is embarrassingly childish in nature.

@aaron chmielewski,
I would even go further to suggest that people who are doing this checking, should hold onto their results until they have done several runs using different options within the software.
Then when you DO publish, be prepared to discuss BOTH negative and positive results.
Afterall, I believe that is how “science” is supposed to be done.

Sonicfrog, (February 23, 2012 at 7:52 am), I agree with you that the use of the terms “anti-climate” and “influential” you highlighted may not make a strong case for forensically identifying the author, but the use of the former has raised many eyebrows. I cannot imagine a skeptic calling his position “anti-climate.” It would be akin to, for example, an antisemite today refering to himself as an antisemite, when the common and favoured terms are “critic of Israel” or “anti-Zionist.” My guess is that the doc has been put together by someone who may be otherwise a bright person, but an utter dufus when it comes to IT-based forgery, which our digitized environment have made harder.

William M Connolley has form in faking information. Perhaps he give us pointers on how he does it? It seems a pity to waste all that experience when it is close at hand.

One thing to note about the scanned PDF: The ‘readable’ text was created by the EPSON’s OCR software as invisible overlay. This is pretty common – it makes the scan’s text searchable. But the OCR software will generate errors in spacing and spelling that are NOT in the original text. For a cleaner analysis the text should be cleaned up to actually match the original before running the JGAAP software….. Anyway, that’s just a thought. I’ll try and remember to try this out later!
Also, I keep seeing people bringing up the ‘yellow dot tracking’ – it doesn’t look like the original scan was made at a resolution where those would be detectable. They’re just low res black and white bitmaps.

I think there might have been a header of some sort that was cropped out (sloppily, I might add) on the 2012 Climate Strategy.pdf:
http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/5586/startdocpg2.jpg
There is also a slight trace of the same artifact on page 1.
After comparing page 2 with a boatload of scanned docs on my drive, a cannot find a similar type of artifact. If page 2 was simply misaligned when it was scanned, the vertical line would have extended the entire length of the page.
Since it occurs in the earliest instance of the memo, it would rule out any ex post facto alterations by DeSmog. It doesn’t rule out any involvement they might have had in the original creation, though.
That being said, feel free to shoot it down with a better theory. 🙂

OK Bill lets try one more time.
‘Besides, it will be fun and we’ll all learn something.’
I did apply for a cliamte grant but as I couldn’t promise that the answer would be CAGW they turned me down.

William seems to be setting the bar at the standard set by Gavin who worked right through the Superbowl to beat McIntyre to a GCHN error that McIntyre discovered.

Shawn Otto has published a result from JGAAP.

“Duke C. says:
February 23, 2012 at 9:31 am
I think there might have been a header of some sort that was cropped out (sloppily, I might add) on the 2012 Climate Strategy.pdf”
Hmmmmm I don’t think that’s part of a header… It just looks like a smudge on the scanner glass.

Peter Kovachev says:
February 23, 2012 at 10:19 am
“… it’s my semi-educated guess that the fix-up may have been done manually on the original, possibly with a white tape or a label.”
That’s plausible. 🙂
Although the type starts so high up on the page that it doesn’t look like it was intended to print on letterhead stationery. Hard to say!

A dood, beg to respectfully differ with your smudge hypothesis. If you were to look again, you’ll note that the anomaly is unnaturally regular; rectangular, straight lined and with an apparent corner. I still place my wager on a shadow caused by a white tape or a label. On second look, it may actually be a shadow caused by the upper corner and edge of the document page, although the abrupt, un-tapered ending of the bottom bit of the line on the left hand side would militate against that. Argh, what I would give for the original doc! Dr Gleick, if you’re reading all our prattle through a curtain of tears, be a jolly good sport and hand the item over to the authorities. Do that and I promise to make you a soap-on-a-rope with your name carved onto it.