Tonight, a prescient prediction made on WUWT shortly after Gleick posted his confession has come true in the form of DeSmog blog making yet another outrageous and unsupported claim in an effort to save their reputation and that of Dr. Peter Gleick as you can read here: Evaluation shows “Faked” Heartland Climate Strategy Memo is Authentic
In a desperate attempt at self vindication, the paid propagandists at DeSmog blog have become their own “verification bureau” for a document they have no way to properly verify. The source (Heartland) says it isn’t verified (and a fake) but that’s not good enough for the Smoggers and is a threat to them, so they spin it and hope the weak minded regugitators retweet it and blog it unquestioned. They didn’t even bother to get an independent opinion. It seems to be just climate news porn for the weak minded Suzuki followers upon which their blog is founded. As one WUWT commenter (Copner) put it – “triple face palm”.
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
Tonight in comments, Russ R. brought attention to his comment with prediction from two days ago:
I just read Desmog’s most recent argument claiming that the confidential strategy document is “authentic”. I can’t resist reposting this prediction from 2 days ago:
Russ R. says:
February 20, 2012 at 8:49 pm
Predictions:
1. Desmog and other alarmist outfits will rush to support Gleick, accepting his story uncritically, and offering up plausible defenses, contorting the evidence and timeline to explain how things could have transpired. They will also continue to act as if the strategy document were authentic. They will portray him simultaneously as a hero (David standing up to Goliath), and a victim (an innocent whistleblower being harassed by evil deniers and their lawyers).
2. It will become apparent that Gleick was in contact with Desmog prior to sending them the document cache. They knew he was the source, and they probably knew that he falsified the strategy document. They also likely received the documents ahead of the other 14 recipients, which is the only way they could have had a blog post up with all the documents AND a summary hyping up their talking points within hours of receiving them.
3. This will take months, or possibly years to fully resolve.
Russ R. is spot on, except maybe for number 3, and that’s where you WUWT readers and crowdsourcing come in. Welcome to the science of stylometry / textometry.
Since DeSmog blog (which is run by a Public Relations firm backed by the David Suzuki foundation) has no scruples about calling WUWT, Heartland, and skeptics in general “anti-science”, let’s use science to show how they are wrong. Of course the hilarious thing about that is that these guys are just a bunch of PR hacks, and there isn’t a scientist among them. As Megan McArdle points out, you don’t have to be a scientist to figure out the “Climate Strategy” document is a fake, common sense will do just fine. She writes in her third story on the issue: The Most Surprising Heartland Fact: Not the Leaks, but the Leaker
… a few more questions about Gleick’s story: How did his correspondent manage to send him a memo which was so neatly corroborated by the documents he managed to phish from Heartland?How did he know that the board package he phished would contain the documents he wanted? Did he just get lucky?If Gleick obtained the other documents for the purposes of corroborating the memo, why didn’t he notice that there were substantial errors, such as saying the Kochs had donated $200,000 in 2011, when in fact that was Heartland’s target for their donation for 2012? This seems like a very strange error for a senior Heartland staffer to make. Didn’t it strike Gleick as suspicious? Didn’t any of the other math errors?
So, let’s use science to show the world what they the common sense geniuses at DeSmog haven’t been able to do themselves. Of course I could do this analysis myself, and post my results, but the usual suspects would just say the usual things like “denier, anti-science, not qualified, not a linguist, not verified,” etc. Basically as PR hacks, they’ll say anything they could dream up and throw it at us to see if it sticks. But if we have multiple people take on the task, well then, their arguments won’t have much weight (not that they do now). Besides, it will be fun and we’ll all learn something.
Full disclosure: I don’t know how this experiment will turn out. I haven’t run it completely myself. I’ve only familiarized myself enough with the software and science of stylometry / textometry to write about it. I’ll leave the actual experiment to the readers of WUWT (and we know there are people on both sides of the aisle that read WUWT every day).
Thankfully, the open-source software community provides us with a cross-platform open source tool to do this. It is called JGAAP (Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program). It was developed for the express purpose of examining unsigned manuscripts to determine a likely author attribution. Think of it like fingerprinting via word, phrase, and punctuation usage.
From the website main page and FAQs:
JGAAP is a Java-based, modular, program for textual analysis, text categorization, and authorship attribution i.e. stylometry / textometry. JGAAP is intended to tackle two different problems, firstly to allow people unfamiliar with machine learning and quantitative analysis the ability to use cutting edge techniques on their text based stylometry / textometry problems, and secondly to act as a framework for testing and comparing the effectiveness of different analytic techniques’ performance on text analysis quickly and easily.
What is JGAAP?
JGAAP is a software package designed to allow research and development into best practices in stylometric authorship attribution.
Okay, what is “stylometric authorship attribution”?
It’s a buzzword to describe the process of analyzing a document’s writing style with an eye to determining who wrote it. As an easy and accessible example, we’d expect Professor Albus Dumbledore to use bigger words and longer sentences than Ronald Weasley. As it happens (this is where the R&D comes in), word and sentence lengths tend not to be very accurate or reliable ways of doing this kind of analysis. So we’re looking for what other types of analysis we can do that would be more accurate and more reliable.
Why would I care?
Well, maybe you’re a scholar and you found an unsigned manuscript in a dusty library that you think might be a previously unknown Shakespeare sonnet. Or maybe you’re an investigative reporter and Deep Throat sent you a document by email that you need to validate. Or maybe you’re a defense attorney and you need to prove that your client didn’t write the threatening ransom note.
Sounds like the perfect tool for the job. And, best of all, it is FREE.
So here’s the experiment and how you can participate.
1. Download, and install the JGAAP software. Pretty easy, works on Mac/PC/Linux
If your computer does not already have Java installed, download the appropriate version of the Java Runtime Environment from Sun Microsystems. JGAAP should work with any version of Java at least as recent as version 6. If you are using a Mac, you may need to use the Software Update command built into your computer instead.
You can download the JGAAP software here. The jar will be named jgaap-5.2.0.jar, once it has finished downloading simply double click on it to launch JGAAP. I recommend copying it to a folder and launching it from there.
2. Read the tutorial here. Pay attention to the workflow process and steps required to “train” the software. Full documentation is here. Demos are here
3. Run some simple tests using some known documents to get familiar with the software. For example, you might run tests using some posts from WUWT (saved as text files) from different authors, and then put in one that you know who authored as a test, and see if it can be identified. Or run some tests from authors of newspaper articles from your local newspaper.
4. Download the Heartland files from Desmog Blog’s original post here. Do it fast, because this experiment is the one thing that may actually cause them to take them offline. Save them in a folder all together. Use the “properties” section of the PDF viewer to determine authorship. I suggest appending the author names (like J.Bast) to the end of the filename to help you keep things straight during analysis.
5. Run tests on the files with known authors based on what you learned in step 3.
6. Run tests of known Heartland authors (and maybe even throw in some non-heartland authors) against the “fake” document 2012 Climate Strategy.pdf
You might also visit this thread on Lucia’s and get some of the documents Mosher used to compare visually to tag Gleick as the likely leaker/faker. Perhaps Mosher can provide a list of files he used. If he does, I’ll add them. Other Gleick authored documents can be found around the Internet and at the Pacific Institute. I won’t dictate any particular strategy, I’ll leave it up to our readers to devise their own tests for exclusion/inclusion.
7. Report your finding here in comments. Make screencaps of the results and use tinypic.com or photobucket (or any image drop web service) to leave the images in comments as URLs. Document your procedure so that others can test/replicate it.
8. I’ll then make a new post (probably this weekend) reporting the results of the experiment from readers.
As a final note, I welcome comments now in the early stages for any suggestions that may make the experiment better. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies investigating this have far better tools I’m told, but this experiment might provide some interesting results in advance of their findings.
@ur momisugly smokey
I agree. A black box, subject to the GIGO effect definitely. Just like climate change models. Fix the inputs and the settings and you can get whatever answer you want.
I was trying to use settings similar to Shawn Otto, but only using a sub-section of the fake memo that is definitely not plagiarized. My result is quite different than his too.
Aslak Grinsted says:
February 24, 2012 at 4:27 am
“@watts: Could you please share your aspect-ratio calculation? I see only two edges to measure from, and I am curious how you measure the aspect ratio from those.”
………………………………….
I see the reminisces of 4 edges.
There are 2 dots in-line at the bottom of the vertical arrows and a dot at the right of the arrows in http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/5586/startdocpg2.jpg
Until the original is released, analyzed by forensic experts, we will not know. [ Maybe, not even then ].
Kinda like “sighting a rifle”…a millimeter off at the sight – exponentially… miles off… down range. It is also the reason why raw data and programming data transparency is important in Climate Science.
This is why my hypothesis doesn’t come with a conclusion. It asks the question, “Does This Fit”?
AFPhys says:
February 23, 2012 at 4:26 pm
Kim2000, DukeC, etc…
One thing that would really make it interesting is if PDFs scanned by Gleick or PI on “plain paper” also just happened to bear those same marks in the upper left hand corner… hmmmm…???
————————————–
Indeed! 🙂
Having lived with this style analysis for a day or so I am beginning to feel that it is very unlikely to produce anything useful. It may well be a parallel to computer models that predict future climate. The variables are so plentiful as to render any conclusion chaotic and unreliable. Good effort, but poor results.
kim2000, nice bit of sleuthing, there.
I have been trying to replicate the steps that the Strategy memo writer followed when creating the document. If you copy and paste the PDF OCR overlay into Microsoft Word you can come very close! When you open Word, it defaults to the same type font and size (Times New Roman 12 point, unless your copy of Word has customized settings). And, it is very easy to add a header that matches the Strategy Memo. So, it’s very plausible.
If you have Word on your computer, you can use this example:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18009262/January%202012%20-%20Copy.doc
Using Evince document viewer (Debian Linux), Properties, fonts in the pdf’s:
The suspect “2012 Climate Strategy” doc:
Times-Bold
Times-Roman
Times-Italic
All identified as Type 1, not embedded.
2012 Fundraising Plan:
TimesNewRomanPSMT, TrueType, not embedded
TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT, TrueType, not embedded
WPTypographicSymbols, TrueType, embedded subset
TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT, TrueType, not embedded
2012 Proposed Budget:
TimesNewRomanPSMT, TrueType, not embedded
TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT, TrueType, not embedded
TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT, TrueType, not embedded
TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT, TrueType, not embedded
WPTypographicSymbols, TrueType, embedded subset
1/17/2012 Board Meeting Agenda:
TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT, TrueType, not embedded
TimesNewRomanPSMT, TrueType, not embedded
TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT, TrueType, not embedded
“Binder1” Notice of 1/17/2012 Board Meeting:
TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT, TrueType, not embedded
TimesNewRomanPSMT, TrueType, not embedded
TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT, TrueType, not embedded
Arial-BoldMT, TrueType, not embedded
ArialMT, TrueType, not embedded
SymbolMT, TrueType (CID), embedded subset
WPTypographicSymbols, TrueType, embedded subset
“Board Meeting Package January 17.pdf”:
TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT, TrueType, not embedded
TimesNewRomanPSMT, TrueType, not embedded
The real Heartland Institute documents consistently use TrueType fonts from a limited group, and every one is using Times New Roman. The “Climate Strategy” pdf uses Times and is not TrueType. Could that be an artifact of the scanning, that the Epson scanner software recognized there was one font in three different forms yet misidentified the exact font?
Occam’s Razor suggests another explanation to me, but I’d rather hear from more experienced commenters about this finding before reaching a definitive conclusion.
Francisco says : “Reliably anti-climate” sounds like a clear giveaway slip.
Definitely. How can you be “anti-climate” ? This comes out of the same word book at “anit-science”. Every paragraph of this memo reeks of being a fake written by warmist. In view of who sent it and the strong parallels to his writing style, I’d say he’s now going to keep his head down until the plea bargaining stage.
“anti-climate” ? Yeah, I’m totally anti-climate, I think climate should be banned! Weather, I can live with, but climate …
Some of this crew, of which Gleick is a good example, have so seriously lost the plot they think climate change itself is the “cause”. Anyone who cared about Earth’s climate, nature, wild-life(no comma) and future of the planet would be over-joyed if the alarming warming trend at the end of the last century flattened out. But for these guys, NOT seeing the climate rush to thermageddon seems to be the end of the world [sic]. They must, at all ends, maintain the pretence, frig the figures, even resort to serious felony to stop anyone saying the awful truth: IT’S NOT AS BAD AS WE THOUGHT.
Environmentalism could be regarded as a cause. Not shitting on our own collective doorstep and destroying a biosphere that keeps us alive makes a lot of sense. Except that the environmental movement seem to have forgotten what REAL pollution looks like.
The whole thing has got rather perverse. It seems they are praying for more catastrophic global warming so they can show how urgently we need to do something to save the planet from catastrophic global warming.
The same is true of the other side to some extent. There seems to be some on the denier end of the sceptic scale that would love to see another LIA so that they can they can be proved right.
I think we should consider ourselves very fortunate to be living in a period with such a benign climate.
It seems the software Anthony suggested using here has little worth as a serious tool, check back in 5 five years. However, the discussion of human analysis of the content seems to have been quite productive.
If, as he claims, someone sent him the memo anonymously, they had a writing style with a remarkably similar style to his own.
Of course, this is not necessarily at odds with his careful statements made so far. He could well have sent it to himself “anonymously” as a precaution.
Unfortunately this adds “premeditated” to the charge sheets, rather than it being an emotional and uncharacteristic mistake in a moment of frustration.
I’d say Gleick is up shit creek.
Most of the people on this thread who have tried running the text analysis software are coming to what I believe to be the correct conclusion – it will not offer much evidence as to who may have written the fake agenda.
The software is reasonably well written and easy to use although I think it could be more useful to be able to save some of the intermediate results and to be able to identify the specific documents in the output. There are many available choices for the type of analysis to be done, but that also creates a problem for the new user at to which ones to choose. To understand these, the user needs an understanding of each method and the process by which the statistics can be calculated. For the latter, a course in multivariate statistical analysis would be recommended as an essential prerequisite.
For example, some of you have used the Character 2Grams as a method. This method counts the frequency of occurrence of all possible consecutive pairs of letters for each document. This forms strings of numbers which are compared to string from the target document. The “closest” document to the target is deemed the most likely to be created by the same author. “Closest” is determined by the choice of Analysis Method and Distance function and differnt selections may very well give conflicting results. To understand what you are getting, you need to know how each of these are defined.
But that isn’t enough. The effectiveness of these methods depends very much on the character of the document to which it is applied, and on the length of the target text. Thus the choice of documents and the comparison individuals used is very important and will affect the conclusions one comes up with. In practice, one would apply many methods to examine various aspects of the text and base their conclusions on the overall picture. This requires some further knowledge and experience to use the methodology properly.
In the case of the fake, we seem to be left with the prospect of doing what we have been doing all along, looking at the words and trying to infer where they came from. Where is Mosher when you need him? 😉
“Could that be an artifact of the scanning, that the Epson scanner software recognized there was one font in three different forms yet misidentified the exact font?”
Some printers have fonts, some rely on the software to render fonts. A scanner is a scanner, it does pixels not fonts.
To get back to fonts implies OCR. That could be part of the scanner software bundle , a separate process done by Gleick, or a feature of Evince. I doubt the latter but have not checked.
A simple jpeg scan can be inserted into a pdf. ANY modern scanner will do a highly respectable scan with a resolution that will be near photo quality. The crappy rendition suggests a low res scan and OCR were probably done as further obfuscation.
+1 for forgery
+1 for premeditation.
oops, I forgot to add …. without a paddle.
Normally I wouldn’t post private conversations, but this may help your analysis. A while back Peter Gleick responded to an email I wrote to him complaining about his article in Forbes “Paper Disputing Basic Science of Climate Change is “Fundamentally Flawed,” Editor Resigns, Apologizes”. He responded fairly quickly, so I suppose that this would be his writing unedited.
He’s already in a whole world of trouble. Since he admitted it fairly early, I guess I have some small hope that he was honest in saying that he didn’t write the fake memo.
From: Peter H. Gleick
To: Scott Basinger ; “pgleick@pacinst.org”
Sent: Saturday, September 3, 2011 2:40:59 PM
Subject: Re: Article in Forbes
There are many examples where theoretical models, created and based on our understanding of physical, chemical, biological (etc.) laws have made predictions BEFORE observations were made. When observations are then made, they either confirm the model, or tell us the model must be adjusted. Models are part of the overall scientific process.
In the end, your statement that modelers must reconcile with reality is correct. But models are a very important and useful part of the process.
There is a classic statement: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Climate models have been incredibly useful.
And frankly, they just saved perhaps hundreds of lives by estimating, incredibly accurately, the path of Hurricane Irene. These models are the children of the climate models we run.
From P. Solar on February 24, 2012 at 10:30 am:
It’s not Evince, the document viewer. It reported no fonts at all in the 2010 IRS Form 990, nor can any text be selected although it is clearly visible and legible. Meanwhile the suspect “Climate Strategy” and the other real Heartland docs have selectable text. Therefore Evince is not performing any OCR, that info would have to be in the pdf.
This isn’t really going to work. The fake document quotes extensively from the other ones. The author used few of his own words.
Duke C. says:
February 24, 2012 at 9:27 am
kim2000, nice bit of sleuthing, there.”
——————-
Thank you, Mr, C 🙂
————————-
“I have been trying to replicate the steps that the Strategy memo writer followed when creating the document. If you copy and paste the PDF OCR overlay into Microsoft Word you can come very close! When you open Word, it defaults to the same type font and size (Times New Roman 12 point, unless your copy of Word has customized settings). And, it is very easy to add a header that matches the Strategy Memo. So, it’s very plausible.
If you have Word on your computer, you can use this example:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18009262/January%202012%20-%20Copy.doc ”
———————————-
Thank you, for your work and link.
I wonder if any readers, here, have a PI actual letterhead [ logo ]?
We might be able to get the actual pixel sizes of the logo?
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
February 24, 2012 at 9:40 am
Using Evince document viewer (Debian Linux), Properties, fonts in the pdf’s:……………”
——————-
That is interesting! Thank you.
“I guess I have some small hope that he was honest in saying that he didn’t write the fake memo.”
I think you maybe are falling into the assumption of what wanted to make people think without actually saying it in a way that would be untruthful.
IIRC he just said “someone” had sent it to him anonymously in the mail.
That statement does not preclude him having written it then (aclaimedly or really) posted it to himself “anonymously”.
That may get him around not having lied in his HuffPo confession but I don’t think it would pass the test for “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” under oath.
I’m wondering how long it would take for anyone else who admitted a felony, to be arrested.
I seem to recall Tallbloke got the dawn raid treatment just to be interviewed as a witness.
re fonts: Heartland appears to have used WordPerfect. Can you tell from the scan whether the fake memo is in Word?
P. Solar says:
February 24, 2012 at 12:30 pm
“IIRC he just said “someone” had sent it to him anonymously in the mail.
That statement does not preclude him having written it then (aclaimedly or really) posted it to himself “anonymously”. ”
Attention. The confession states that he received a document in the snail mail. And it says he forwarded “the material” to DeSmogBlog et.al. But it DOESN’T say anything about whether the snail mailed document was part of that; whether the snail mailed document is identical to the suspect strategic memo, and whether or not he produced the memo himself. It’s very carefully wordsmithed to leave all of these conditions open. This also means that it was a lawyer who wrote it. It also has no redundant parentheses.
Anthony, you are an evil man 🙂 Some organization needs to give you a genius award! Sorry, I can’t be a part of your consenses.
P. Solar said @ur momisugly February 24, 2012 at 10:13 am
All too true P. I remember back in the 1960s when living in UKLand that if it started to rain after me mam hung out the washing, she’d rush to get it off the clothesline. There was so much soot in the air, the clothes would have ended up dirtier than before they were washed. Now that was pollution! Personally, I’d like just a tad more warmth in the summer, but then I live in the southern hemisphere where we don’t seem to have any “global” warming.
Pompous Gits being what they are (fragile ego and all) I used a number of examples of my own writing. This software enables me to “prove” that The Git did, or did not write what he wrote. Of course I’ve never used this software before and don’t really understand what I am doing. It’s probably even less useful than grammar checkers.
Steve McIntyre said @ur momisugly February 24, 2012 at 1:11 pm
Opened Kim2000’s copy of the Word doc in Word 2010 (default settings) but the lines of text are too long. It creates 10 instances of orphaned words on their own line.
Steve McIntyre says:
February 24, 2012 at 1:11 pm
re fonts: Heartland appears to have used WordPerfect. Can you tell from the scan whether the fake memo is in Word?
——————————————————————————————————————–
The font is an Identical match in Word 2003. Kerning and line spacing is off, however. I printed out 2012 Climate Strategy.pdf and overlaid it on a printout of a Word doc version, w/ default settings, and held it up to a back-light.
Don’t have access to WordPerfect. The results might be telling. Since it’s a TrueType font, however, they me be indistinguishable from each other.
Here’s an idea for those who have a full version of Adobe and/or WordPerfect.
Open a new doc and type the first paragraph of 2012 Climate Strategy w/ the default settings. then try it with settings from one of the HI Pdfs, and the settings from a PI Pdf. Print them out, overlay them, and hold them up to a back-light. Do any of the combinations match up?
Elmer from m4gw had an interesting post on some of the discrepancies between the forged document and the others.
The forger probably did not reset the default formatting on their word-processing app all that carefully. It looks like all they did was go for a font/pt match and decided that was good enough.
http://www.minnesotansforglobalwarming.com/m4gw/2012/02/desmogbloggate.html
“The Style is Different: The faked “2012 Climate Strategy” is in a completely different style than the other live text documents. They both use the Font “Times New Roman” and they are both 12pt but that is where the similarities end. The headlines and subheads on the real documents are 18 pt., the subheads are numbered and the paragraphs are indented. The fake document doesn’t use any of these devices.
“…The Leading is Different: In all of the live text documents the leading is 14pt but on the fake memo its 16 pt. I overlayed the fake document (in gray) over the real one to show the difference.”
Got this link from Wikipedia. PDF from PI for typeset comparison. The content is amusing, as well.
http://www.pacinst.org/publications/testimony/Gleick_Senate_Commerce_2-7-07.pdf