Guest post by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Yesterday I had the pleasure of chairing a packed meeting in the Palace of Westminster (don’t tell the Clerk of the Parliaments), at which Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT spoke even more brilliantly than usual on “global warming”, and engagingly answered many questions from Parliamentarians and the public.
Afterwards, Dick went to brief a Cabinet Minister (who shall be nameless, but he is a good egg, and privately regards catastrophic manmade “global warming” as nonsense). The Minister indicated – in effect, and with scarcely-concealed regret – that the party line set by David Cameron in response to various opinion polls, focus groups and other such artifices for identifying and following a consensus rather than setting a lead, and not the objective scientific and economic truth, was likely to remain the basis of UK climate policy.
In reality, orders issued to our elected nominal “government” by the hated, unelected Kommissars of the EU, our true government, who have exclusive competence to decide and dictate the UK’s environment and climate policies, are and will remain the basis of UK climate policy, regardless of what (or whether) Cameron and his vapid focus groups think (if “think” is the right word). Government of the people, by the people, for the people has perished from this once-free, formerly-democratic corner of the Earth. We have all the trappings of democracy and none of the reality.
Over tea and scones at the National Liberal Club while Dick was with the Minister, several of us discussed what we call Fakegate – the frauds recently perpetrated to the detriment of the blameless Heartland Institute. Among some there was a feeling, often expressed by the nicer but more woolly-headed and ineffectual sort of skeptic, that somehow scientists who commit frauds ought not to be prosecuted for them, for otherwise academic research would become impossible.
I hear this unsoundly-founded point so often that it is hard to keep an even temper. A fraud is a fraud is a fraud, whether perpetrated by a scientist or by anyone else. The mistreatment to which the Heartland Institute has been subjected by a fraudster and counterfeiter constitutes several serious, imprisonable offenses, known in US law as felonies. The perps, whoever they be, should be investigated, brought for trial, prosecuted, and fined or – better still – imprisoned. Punishment for specific, manifest scientific frauds in no way prejudices, compromises, or trammels the freedom and purity of academic research. It protects and enhances them.
Three frauds are evident in Fakegate. First, wire fraud by whoever used electronic means to obtain internal documents that were the property of the Heartland Institute by what the ineffable Richard Black of the unspeakable BBC calls “subterfuge” and what the criminal law bluntly calls “deception”. Secondly, circulation of a counterfeit document purporting to be a true Heartland document. Thirdly, reporting of the affair with reckless disregard for whether the counterfeit document was genuine on the part of the loony-left BBC, the Pooterish Scotsman, Britain’s Marxist daily The Guardian, and various blogs, notably the relentlessly malevolent and consequently uninfluential Desmogblog.
Title 18 (Crimes and Criminal Procedure), Part I (Crimes), Chapter 63 (Mail Fraud and other Fraud Offenses) of the US Codex Iuris deals with “Mail Fraud and other Fraud Offenses”. Paragraph 1341 defines “fraud” simpliciter:
“Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property” [or, by Paragraph 1346, “the intangible right of honest services”] “by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, or to … procure for unlawful use any … article, or anything represented to be or intimated or held out to be such counterfeit or spurious article, for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice or attempting so to do, … or deposits or causes to be deposited any matter or thing whatever to be sent or delivered by any private or commercial interstate carrier, or takes or receives therefrom, any such matter or thing, or knowingly causes to be delivered by … such carrier according to the direction thereon, … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. …”
In general, whoever knowingly perpetrates across state boundaries or recklessly perpetuates a deception calculated to cause financial or pecuniary advantage in goods or services to some or suchlike loss to others commits the Federal criminal offense of fraud.
If the deception be furthered by electronic means, it is wire fraud. If it be furthered by the use of counterfeit documents, it is a distinct count of fraud. If it be furthered by reckless and detrimental publication and repetition of the contents of counterfeit documents as though they were the real thing, when no steps before publication had been taken to verify that the documents relied upon were true, it is also fraud.
Let us begin with the wire fraud. The relevant US statutory offense seems to me to be 18 USC 1343 (Wire Fraud) of the US Codex Iuris, which opens with these words:
“Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property” [or, by Paragraph 1346, “the intangible right of honest services”] “by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”
I am unfamiliar with US law, and cannot confirm that these provisions still stand part of the US code, or that they have not been amended, or that there is no case law or rule of interpretation preventing their application in the present case. On the face of it, though, the obtaining of documents that were the property of the Heartland Institute by a scheme or artifice whereby the fraudster misrepresented himself as a Board member of the Heartland Institute was achieved by electronic means across state boundaries between the Pacific and the Great Lakes.
The term “interstate commerce” is interpreted latae sententiae in US law, since it is widely defined in the US Constitution itself. Therefore, the fraudster would not be able to escape a wire-fraud charge by asserting that his deception of the Institute was not “in interstate commerce”. Even if the court were to find that the deception was not “in interstate commerce”, the deception would still constitute fraud simpliciter under paragraph 1341 of the Code, though not wire fraud under paragraph 1343.
Next, the fraud arising from the creation and circulation of the counterfeit document. Whether or not the fraudster who deceived the Institute also uttered the bogus document, he certainly circulated it. Consequently, even if he thought but did not know it was genuine, his reckless circulation of it without having verified that it was genuine, and in the company of other documents obtained by fraud, would constitute a distinct but connected fraud charge – and, given the malicious content of the counterfeit document and the very grave harm that it was calculated to do to the Institute, a very serious charge at that. The court would also take account of the fact that the perp had obtained all documents but the counterfeit document from the Institute and was, in the circumstances, under a particular duty to verify the genuineness of the document before circulating it with the others.
Finally, there is the fraud perpetrated by the various news and in
ternet media, especially in the UK (where Marxism is many journalists’ creed) in perpetuating the Fakegate fraud by rushing to publication or broadcast without having verified the genuineness of the document that turned out to be counterfeit. Here, the well-established legal doctrine of mens rea applies. To commit a crime, one must know that one is committing a crime, or one must act in a manner calculated to cause harm to another while being reckless as to whether the harm that one’s actions are calculated to cause constitutes a criminal offense.
Fraud charges against the guilty news media and blogs would not be likely unless and until the Fakegate fraudster had first been brought to justice before a Federal court.
The dripping malevolence of the commentaries by the various news media and blogs on what the counterfeit document purported to reveal about the Heartland Institute’s supposed attitude to the teaching of science in schools would count very much against them in court. The intent to cause harm to the Heartland, and to cause collateral damage to Anthony Watts and others, is very clear. On the other hand, those who at least acted promptly by publishing Heartland’s announcement that the document was counterfeit will have mitigated their crime to some extent. Those blogs that continue to publish the counterfeit document rather than removing it, and one blog that pretended to “confirm” the document as genuine, will face long prison sentences.
Or will they? Much of the scientific criminality surrounding the “global warming” scam only happens because the fraudsters in white lab-coats reckon that they are untouchable. They have the protection of governments, who are themselves profiting mightily by the scam; they are fawned upon by the news media, much as Al Capone was in Chicago; they are lionized by their academic institutions for the massive government grants they attract to investigate what, day by day, becomes more visibly a teacup tempest rebranded as Apocalypse; and, worst of all, the skeptics who ought to report the frauds – and without whose reports the authorities are unlikely to act ex proprio motu – are a bunch of wee, cowering, timorous beasties.
Since fraud across state boundaries is a Federal offense, any citizen of the United States, whether or not he is in any way connected with any of the parties to the frauds, has the right – and the duty – to go to his nearest police station and make a complaint that frauds have been committed to the detriment of the Heartland Institute. The complainant does not need to have any connection with the Institute, nor any permission from it. He just has to be as outraged as I am.
All he has to do is to go in and ask the police to investigate the frauds that have occurred. The facts are plain enough, and so is the law. The police will be bound to investigate and to pass a report of their investigation to the District Attorney, who, in matters of interstate fraud, would be likely to consult the State’s Attorney General. On the facts as I now have them, prosecution would certainly result, and conviction would be very likely.
But will anyone act? Around the fragrant tea-table overlooking the silent Thames, there was a marked reluctance to do anything other than talk about it. One said, “I couldn’t possibly make a complaint. Just think of all the unwelcome publicity.” In fact, there would be no publicity, since any complainant not connected with the Heartland Institute will play no further role in the case once he has undertaken the simple duty of reporting the fraud to his friendly, local police station.
Another said, “We really mustn’t interfere with academic freedom in this way.” Yet the action of the fraudster was not an exercise of academic freedom, still less a triumph for it. It was an abuse of it. It was a fraud. It was an offense. It was a serious offense. Read the Code.
The law, said Cicero in a beautiful passage in his De Legibus, is founded upon and rooted in love. And what is a sin? In Christian theology it is a failure of love. A sin is a sin because its fake-etrator is knowingly or recklessly doing harm and, to the extent of the harm done, is failing to love the victims of his wrongdoing. It is precisely because of the harm done to the Heartland Institute and to Anthony Watts and others that the sin – in law the offense – is grave. And it is precisely to prevent such harm from being done that the law provides punishment for fraudsters – as long as someone, anyone, has the guts to go into a police station and start the ball rolling by making a complaint.
If just one or two of the numerous scientific frauds that are being reported to me were instead reported to the police, and if prosecutions and convictions were to ensue in just one or two cases, the “global warming” scam would come sharply to an end. Those scientists working in climate and related fields who have acted or published fraudulently (there are just a few of them, and they know who they are) would once again be reminded that they are not an untouchable, priestly caste at liberty to ignore the laws that the rest of us must follow. As the late Lord Denning used to say, in that gentle Hampshire accent of his, “Be you never so high, the law is above you.”
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To A physicist February 23, 2012 at 8:08 am
Try again. You have misinterpreted demagoguery to suit your purposes, which is to attempt to deflect the demagoguery committed by your friends on “The Team”, and others, who have called for prosecution and imprisonment of anyone who would dare to defy the forces CAGW. Advocating for the prosecution of someone who has apparently committed an actual crime, vs. advocating for persecution of someone who has done something legal but which you don’t like, is not equivalent. You are getting tiresome.
Seems like defamation more than fraud. Was Heartland deceived? Not for a minute.
Mike M;
So are you going to go to your local police and lay out a complaint against SciAm? Put up or …
Monckton calls us “wee, cowering, timorous beasties.” Prove him wrong.
[I’m a Cdn resident, or I’d do it myself. Needs to be a US action. )B( ]
I learned from “a physicist’s” link that Hitler was a huge fan of the consensus mindset and its application as opposed to individual decision making via democratic methods. I’d like to thank “a physicist” for helping me to better understand the type of person that feels that consensus is a vital component of postnormal climate science. By the way Hitler had the support of the nature loving German Green Party and actually gave out oak tree seeds to winners during the German sponsored Olympics. It almost brings a tear to my eye when I think about the rich history of those greenies who felt man was a disease to nature.
Lord Monckton presents an interesting idea… But if the average Joe decides to make a complaint at the local police station, wouldn’t the police simply claim it is out of their jurisdiction? I doubt they take complaints in Peoria about crimes that were perpetrated in Downtown Chicago (or across state lines).
I’ve had very few dealings with the police and really don’t know the answer… Can any lawyers chime in? Can someone who has not been harmed directly file a complaint? (without going into the great economic harm being perpetrated upon us collectively by scientifically or economically non-viable policies – a harm which would take more than the average Joe to establish, even though it is much greater, more harmful and more obvious).
“Is this so really different than Climategate?”
You do understand that one case involves public documents subject to sunshine law disclosure and the other involves documents produced by and for a private organization, right?
Scientific fraud is not what is at issue. It’s not an honest mistake to claim some exemption based on academic freedom – it’s intentionally misleading. What Gleick (and anyone acting concert such as his mysterious anonymous donor and possible DeSmog) did was an attack on science, not an attempt to conduct science. It’s also not a whole lot different than claiming an exempton for selling one orange grove over and over and over again while claiming a scientfic advance that will the orange grove more productive. If it’s fraud, it’s still not scientific fraud. I’ll go with the motive of committing regular fraud with a motive of concealing his own scientific fraud.
Separately and for further hypothetical discussion, Monckton may have forgotten about RICO. Originally for fighting organized crime, but broadly effective against other types of acting as a defacto crime organization without having to prove a direct conspiracy. (Ask Michael Milliken) Can the ones actively promoting the Gleick fraud adequately separate their gain (they make their living off their opinion and their opinion is advanced unless the fraud is exposed) from their political belief in knowingly promoting the fraud? And is it too late for them to walk it back? — Generally though, i agree with most that this whole idea of a fraud prosecution turns on prosecutorial discretion. But maybe Patrick Fitzgerald could trick Trenberth into lying to him about what he knew when he co-wrote that article with Gleick and Abrams.
Less hypothetically, science in service of politics is not recognized as scientific fraud although it can be no other. Isn’t that where the climate science went off the tracks to start with? If you oppose science in service of politics, then your opponent discredits you as having a political motive. Sound familiar? Sound like “sustainable” science?
Then there is the remaining ethical problem: Greenpeace style harrassment in Greenpeace, in the press, in government.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley,
Your post is a call for skeptics to step forward. Thanks for that. However, let’s not get misdirected by the Gleick hoax affair.
Yes, the Gleick hoax affair is a poisoned dart aimed at the heart of scientific honor. Yet, more importantly, it is not focus on the Gleick hoax but focus on the fundamental ideas that will make our great freedom based culture advance toward higher enlightenment. That, not Gleick, must now take our highest priority. Right?
Independent thinkers (aka skeptics) will lose if those fundamental ideas of freedom based culture are not the main focus. As you have done, focusing briefly on Gleick’s hoax is important but only as a classic example of the irrational fundamental ideas of the anti-humanity culture that are the basis of the IPCC centric ’cause’. Let’s get on now with aggressive positive support of our fundamental ideas that ground firmly our precious freedom based cultures. We must remember that objective skeptical science processes are just one element, albeit an important one, in support of our freedom based culture.
John
to A physicist, so any charge of criminal malfeasance can be defended by a counter charge of demogogery? You are so far out on a limb on that one as to render your comment self evidently ridiculous.
HankHenry, Was heartland deceived? Well, if I was to pretend to be a relative of yours (via electronic mail means) to solicit personal information of yours, which I could use to cause you actual harm, I would be guilty of deceiving you and I would be guilty of ID fraud.
So in committing ID fraud to gain documents that he was not lawfully entitled to, Peter Gleick has publicly admitted and confessed to committed a deceptive act. He used ID fraud to obtain documents by deception, with the intention of publicly causing harm by slander to the Heartland institute. Several distinct CRIMINAL offences. These are offences in criminal as well as common law.
Of course the police should begin a criminal investigation and charges should be brought against Peter Gleick and his accomplices who acted as accessories to the criminal acts. Then let a criminal court decide who is guilty.
Come on people. This is clearly a false flag op perpetrated by the connivers at the Heartland Institute. Dr. Gleick’s biggest sin, other than being a supporter of a healthy earth and concerned about the dire consequences of fossil fuel usage, is being a trusting individual. HI has passed a phony looking document through Peter Gleick in order to discredit him and others of us who care about the planet.
Please. If you support science and are sick of the attacks on the good people who are trying to do the right thing about CO2, join me…. raise your voices…. say it with me now:
ICH BIN EIN PETER!
re: venues for legal/criminal complaints
I’m no lawyer, but within the USA I think one can state with confidence that local police departments will not even consider an investigation into possible violations of federal law, especially where the actions alleged/admitted in the case occurred in other jurisdictions.
Legal complaints and requests for investigation need to go to the relevant US Attorney’s offices in places such as Chicago, IL (location of Heartland Institute) and Oakland, CA (where Peter Gleick and his Pacific Institute are located). Despite the ubiquity of the Internet I don’t think that a US Attorney’s office in a city which is not explicitly associated with a victim or perp would start the case.
There may be other ways to try to get the FBI involved directly.
CRU emails and Heartland docs are two very different things.
CRU publicly funded, publicly accountable, no forged emails.
Heartland privately funded and accountable to only themselves, forged doc distributed………..
No, not as far as privacy laws are concerned. I happen to have arbitrary read access, should I choose to exercise it, to the email spool directory of the Duke physics department (around 25 years ago I helped set up its original Unix network and managed it for years, and am one of the only Duke faculty who still has systems administrator status as well as faculty status). Of course I have a professional code of ethics that prevents me from doing any such thing, I have signed agreements that I would do no such thing (outside of the course of my job and with very severe restrictions as to what constitutes an exception), and there are laws that threaten to punish me for doing any such thing. Those laws and rules do not provide exceptions for “I think they are avoiding FOIA requests so I’m going to do it anyway”.
Almost precisely the same crime has been committed in both cases. I say “almost” because the real difference isn’t the violation of privacy (which is severe and illegal in both cases), it is the allegation of fraud. It is bad enough to steal my email spool file and make its contents public, including conversations I might have had in the good faith belief that they were and would remain private. It is unconscionable to steal my email spool file, EDIT IT TO MAKE IT APPEAR THAT I AM A CRIMINAL OR CAD, and then publish it for the express purpose of FALSELY destroying my reputation.
Personally, not being a complete idiot I try to keep my list of gay lovers, undergrads with whom I’m having affairs, my kiddie porn collection, and the records of my thriving business selling cocaine out of my email spool file, so that for the most part my own mother could read its contents and not be offended were she still alive. There are a few trade secrets in there, and I have been known to voice an unguarded opinion that certain people are complete and total idiots and a waste of perfectly good air to people I trust, even when I have to maintain a public face and work the the individual in question as if they aren’t an accident of evolution gone horribly wrong, but that’s pretty much the extent of the real damage that could be done by publishing all umpty gigabytes of my email spool from the last few decades as one enormous book.
There is no limit to the damage that could be done if its contents were tampered with along the way, if kiddie porn is inserted, cocaine transactions inserted, and so on, first.
That’s why this entire affair has the characteristics of major league “tempest in a tea pot” writ large across its face. I find it hard to believe that grown adult humans would self-destruct in this particular way, but then, yeah, some people are just a waste of good air, evolution gone awry. Whatever Gleick hoped to prove, what he actually proved is that he is an … oh dear there I am about to libel the man. That he is whatever a court of law, should one ever be invoked, concludes that he is.
Sad, really.
rgb
At this point, it’s starting to appear as though a physicist is a thoroughly indoctrinated student of the infamous Post Normal Science student body. Comments which show no indication of ever having been exposed to Aristotelian Logic at all, inasmuch as there is no single part of the definition of demagogery which fits Monckton’s comments, neither in genus, nor differentia.
It would seem on the written evidence, the individual seems to believe that saying something is so, makes it so, this is like claiming that swiping a brush through water paints a wall, and then claiming a bucket of water is paint.
Willis, please let me direct your attention to a WUWT comment that supplies the evidence and logic that you have requested,which perhaps you have overlooked, and upon which you may wish to comment.
“Climate skeptics, for example, speak of the individual(s) who outed the “Climategate” postings as being some sort of hero, in spite of the fact that what he or she or they did is almost certainly, strictly speaking, a criminal act. Of course so is some of what was being revealed by Climategate emails — arguably criminal acts.”
This is not such a clean cut case. IF the “leaker” of the climategate emails was an insider with lawful access to these files, then this person could be granted whistle-blower status. Additionally, the Information commissioner stated that the CRU was acting unlawfully in preventing the release of the data which was leaked. Additionally, IF that data was publicly available on the internet to anyone who happened to type in the correct address into a public facing browser, or if they followed a public link to the FTP store, due to the CRU’s own incompetence at leaving all this data open, then that data would actually have been accidentally placed into the public domain by the CRU’s own negligence. Therefore no theft or fraud would have taken place on behalf of the whistle-blower.
In this ‘fakegate’ example, Peter Gleick willingly and with malice aforethought did commit ID fraud to obtain these documents by deception, as he admitted. If it can be proven that he committed this fraud with the criminal intent of causing harm to the Heartland institute, through publication of these along with the fake document, to damage their reputation.with the public and to cause harm by publishing the identities of their donors and thus to put future donations to the Institute at risk, then he should be looking at a custodial prison sentence.
Rob Crawford says:
Yes. Of course. But what if the Climategate emails contained a few fakes? Would you then want Anthony prosecuted distributing them? Do you really want each and every email verified to be authentic before making them available? What I am suggesting is that news sources (blogs, papers, and so forth) should not be prosecuted for being duped as long as they present a retraction once the truth is known. In the above article, I think that Lord Monckton is suggesting the prosecution of organizations who honestly thought they were publishing whistle blower material.
In this one point, I think the two cases are very similar.
“But what if the Climategate emails contained a few fakes?”
They don’t.
It is always a pleasure to me, to listen Christopher Monckton of Brenchley’s words and arguments. They let me know he has studied and realized the science of philosophy as a part of nature. Unfortunately this science of philosophy is shifted into the nirvana from the governments and have replaced it with charmed fallacies, people love. Now there is confusion in the consciousness of the specialists. Some have lost their trust, others still stay outside but nobody knows what’s inside going on these days.
There are celebration of ethics called taskforce, but it seems that the task is just a confession out of the individual confusion or bias. But a confused or biased mind cannot realize the holy methods of science; it will fail. Truth is not to alienate, it is coupled to the own consciousness.
It seems that the spirit of this age is stamped with a revolution in the consciousness of all people call in question the practice governed by kings or authorities (Pink Floyd has a vision decades ago). Looking around the Mediterranean sea, to financial games called science, or editors and their peers on ‘real science’, it seems that the very same revolution in the consciousness of consumers of climate science confession has taken place. It reminds me on the story of David and Goliath.
But I think it is hard to retrieve the timeless principles of philosophy in a week or ten, except if there is a natural unbiased unconditioned brave mind.Shams ad-Din i Tabriz says, „The easiest of science is the science of purification rituals and the branches of jurisprudence. More difficult than that are the principles of jurisprudence. Still more difficult are the principles of theology, and even more difficult is the science of philosophy and metaphysics.”
This and the knowledge of Parmenides’s recognitions can recognize persecution as a trap to the conditioned mind; it leads the mind away from that what IS.
I feel fine A.W. is part of the revolution in the battle field of climate kingship, and as well listen to a speech long time not heard in this confused world.
Respect.
V.
Scottish Sceptic says:
February 23, 2012 at 8:18 am
I’m afraid the law itself, as practised today, is “totally unethical, immoral and illegal”. The common law, well, that’s something else (see Magna Carta, etc.).
.Abbreviated version: you’re not going to get any joy from these people. Forget about it.
OK, so i arrived too late to slap down A Physicist on his misunderstanding of (or willfull blindness to) the meaning of his own link. Did anyone find the humour in his later post regarding Lord Moncton’s internet hit? “A google search for Lord MOncton and Demagogue… finds over 11,00 hit, few of which praise him” . So now it is not just climate science which is decided by concensus, it is Mr. Moncton’s status as a demogogue as well.
[Check for typo’s in that quoted search. Robt]
And it is evident (IMHO) that the uncertainties presently associated to P_CAGW are sufficiently great, that no rational person (whether skeptic or scientist) can confidently assert that this probability is less than ~20% or greater than 80%.
Yes! It is indeed evident. Thanks for pointing out that the one who said “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” was a complete and utter moron! I can’t stand demagoguery either.
For our children’s generation, the probability P_CAGW is the only thing that matters in the end; all else is destined to be forgotton.
Thank you for your anit-demagogueriness, A Physicist! That which will be forgotten includes that other stupid, non-statistical weather forecast: “when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.”
wsbriggs,
The name for that world view is the philosophical system of Pragmatism from the likes of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859-1952).
There are, since them, other splinters from those pragmatists that extend the pragmatist’s world view into our 21st century.
John
Die Zauberflotist, If your theory is correct that the Heartland Institute themselves created the “fake” document by which to entrap Peter Gleick, then he was stupid to then allow himself to be motivated by his own personal hatred to then commit ID fraud. So not only is he a self-confessed criminal, he is a stupid, self confessed criminal.
However your theory might fall apart if a criminal investigation discovers that Peter created the fake document himself.
That would prove criminal intent to cause harm.
I am buying shares in popcorn manufacturers. 🙂
Academics who publish work that is dead wrong can get away with it as long as nobody is harmed. However, when it comes to “Climate Science”, immense harm is being done and huge sums of money are being wasted. When the IPCC’s house of cards comes crashing down it is vital that the perpetrators know they will be held accountable.
Almost right, friend Camel. Whether or not somebody is harmed by scientific work is still not the issue, not if the work in question was done in good faith and if it presented a fair and balanced treatment of things. It’s not that my algebra could not be wrong, that my concepts could be mistaken, that I could misinterpret the data or fail to consider a confounding variable — what scientist has not done some of that (and ever done anything useful). It is whether or not I deliberately and in bad faith falsified my research to promote a conclusion (even if I believe that conclusion to be true). It is whether or not I deliberately omitted or misled people about work that casts doubt on my findings (and beliefs), lest people fail to arrive at the conclusion I want them to arrive at (whether or not I think that conclusion is really true).
If I am an honest, an honest mistake is an honest mistake and anyone who adopts the science (mistaken or not) does so at their own risk and with their eyes open; surely all of scientific knowledge is caveat emptor, provisional truth and not certain knowledge. Problems arise when I fake the data, when I manipulate people’s emotions, when I plead for their money without honestly stating the gambles and tradeoffs involved. If I sell you a horse, you must count its teeth yourself — the law and ethical common sense protects you only if I’ve outfitted the horse with a set of very deceptive false teeth.
Otherwise science (and commerce and other areas of human endeavor) truly could not move — one could be sued just for being mistaken, and of course all of physics is probably mistakenand it is quite impossible to say that nobody is ever harmed by many of the mistakes. Often they are, or have been. Should we sue Newton’s Ghost for failing to come up with relativistic quantum theory, even though countless generations of people were “harmed” by fact that classical physics can’t predict all sorts of useful stuff that would have saved or improved lives? Should we sue Fermi’s Ghost for Hiroshima or Chernobyl? No, because nobody was deceptive, their science was the best they could come up with and nobody could see precisely how it would eventually fail or what the — erm — “fallout” of a discovery would be.
Feynman puts it best in his Cargo Cult article. Deception has no place in science. If you can avoid deceiving yourself, that’s the hardest part. Then you just have to be honest in the ordinary way after that. The problem with the IPCC isn’t that the work it promotes could be wrong and that there could be harm associated with it being incorrect, but rather is that they are deliberately and openly deceptive and neither present a balanced treatment of the science nor one that correctly acknowledges the uncertainties. They are trying to prevent the public from being fully informed on the issues because they fear that if they honestly stated the uncertainties and probable boundaries of reliable knowledge here, nobody would (literally) buy into the CAGW story line.
The top-post on “Omitted Variable Fraud” yesterday is a case in point. It is fine to leave a variable out of a model. It’s your model, and as long as you clearly describe what you put in an what you left out, and why, people can decide what sort of credence to give its results. Note that even in your own model, deliberately leaving out a variable that could be highly explanatory because it might confound your own desired explanation is straight up deceiving yourself, pretending to yourself that it isn’t important when you really don’t know or even rather suspect that it is but don’t want others to think so.
Its rather another thing to pretend that the variable in question simply doesn’t exist, that it cannot have explanatory power when rather obviously it does and when many people have pointed this out. Even if one personally thinks that it isn’t the right explanation, it is nevertheless attendant upon them to present the opposing viewpoint in any public debate with enormous costs and consequences, even if you think it will weaken the argument that you think is correct to where your “side” in that debate will lose.
Feynman gives a lovely example of that — an astrophysicist who won’t tell the public how “useless” the knowledge he seeks really is in the real world, for fear that the public won’t want to fund it. Feynman points out that this is a kind of fraud in and of itself, deliberately acting in a deceptive way to engineer some particular desired outcome.
If you wished to argue that responsible scientists should conform to Feynman’s rather high standards especially carefully in research with high stakes outcomes — medical research, climate research, bioweapon research — I would completely agree. There one really should bend over backwards to avoid overstating results that should prove to be very expensive if they are incorrect. But truly, it should be standard of practice everywhere.
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John Whitman says: “Independent thinkers (aka skeptics) will lose if those fundamental ideas of freedom based culture are not the main focus.”
Two fingers to freedom based culture … that’s political hyperbole …. usually right wing trash hyperbole.
The last thing we need is more hyperbole in climate science. What we need is decent science we can trust. Science which is not polluted by political hyperbole, science where no activists, neither warmist nor sceptic has a place.
Then we would believe it!