This press release, initially published here, is reproduced in full below.
FEBRUARY 27, 2012 – The Heartland Institute today released an analysis of the fake “climate strategy” memo circulated by Pacific Institute President Peter Gleick to fellow environmental activists and journalists on February 14, 2012.
The analysis, written by Heartland President Joseph Bast, refutes the most damaging claims that appear in the forged memo:
- The Charles G. Koch Foundation does not fund Heartland’s climate change efforts and did not contribute $200,000 in 2011. The foundation has issued a statement confirming that its 2011 gift of $25,000 – its first to Heartland in ten years – was earmarked for a health care reform project.
- “[D]issuading teachers from teaching science” is not and never has been Heartland’s goal. Heartland is working with highly qualified and respected experts to create educational material on global warming suitable for K-12 students that isn’t alarmist or overtly political.
- Heartland does not pay scientists or their organizations to act as spokespersons or to “counter” anyone else in the international debate over climate change. It pays them to help write and edit a series of reports titled Climate Change Reconsidered, in much the same way as any other “think tank” or scientific organization pays the authors of its publications.
- Heartland does not try to “keep opposing voices out” of forums, such as Forbes.com, where climate policy has been debated. The truth is just the opposite: We send Heartland spokespersons to debate other experts at fora all across the country and invite persons who disagree with us to speak at our own events.
The analysis is accompanied by a copy of the forged memo with the forger’s own words highlighted. (Note: Text that is not highlighted is not necessarily accurate, and often it is not. Such text generally paraphrases text appearing in one of the stolen documents but was deliberately twisted or falsified to create a false impression.)
The analysis and marked up copy of the fake document can be found at Fakegate.org.
Previous press releases from The Heartland Institute plus links to more than 100 news reports and commentaries on the global warming scandal can be reviewed at Fakegate.org. For more information, contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at jlakely@heartland.org or 312/377-4000.
Peter Miller
Thanks. However, please note I’m at the Met Office Hadley Centre, not UEA.
Oh, and I don’t consider myself part of an “CAGW cult”. I am convinced that AGW exists and that the negative impacts will probably outweigh the positive ones, but as for “catastrophic” I’m not sure. May be, may not be – lots more work to do there…..! As far as society’s response is concerned, weighing up the costs of action vs. those of inaction, well it’s all down to our collective attitude to risk. People’s opinions clearly vary hugely on this, and it’s not my job to tell people what to do. I only give them my interpretation of the scientific evidence – what they do with that information is up to them.
IanR says:
February 27, 2012 at 10:29 pm
There’s a big difference between posting something and claiming that it is true, and posting something in order to debunk it.
Everyone commenting that Gleick should be criminally prosecuted are way off base. First off the Lefty prosecutors in Calif and the US Justice Dept. will never go after a fellow Lefty. Secondly, they shouldn’t. This is sophmoric stuff, piting one tax subsidized nonprofit against another. If heartland was damaged, let them sue Pacific and Gleick. Ultimately, I believe HI will financially profit from this affair, so they’ll wind up suing Pacific and Gleick for injunction, to prevent any future lies about HI. Gleick is professionally destroyed of course; we’ll soon see a press release from Pacific that Gleick has left to spend more time with his family and explore other opportunities. That’s fine, Gleick will have paid the proper measure for his fraud.
It will most likley go down like this. The FBI will open an investigation. put a gag order on all material (preventing civil action). They will stretch the investigation out until November or longer (depending on the election). Then they will decline to prosecute. Meanwhile Gleick will cop a plea to a lesser (misdomeaner) on the state charges and get defered ajutcation and community service.
NK babbles on February 28, 2012 at 6:10 am:
I couldn’t agree with you more. What good is a justice system if it doesn’t let climate justice warriors get by with anything they want?
In other news, nobody ever gets prosecuted fro this kind of thing, anyway:
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2012/02/cloud-shepherd-.html
ChE says:
February 27, 2012 at 1:58 pm and many others: Note that he did not say “equality”, he said “equity”. These two words are very different in their actual use in the society. Equity is much more meaningful. See also “chancery”. The history of “equity” is the history of a word taking on more and more meanings in different contexts.
Richard Betts says:
February 28, 2012 at 5:51 am
@Peter Miller
– – – – –
Richard Betts,
Appreciated your comment. Here are some of my comments and questions.
Do you, as the most fundamental premise, hold that any CO2 added to the atmosphere by any activity of man must be managed by government? I do not.
Do you maintain the classic Malthusian postulate that certain people should control the reproduction of other people in general? I do not.
I notice that you say ‘lots more work to do there’. I agree, but not if you are implying that it is the IPCC that basically has that ‘lots more work to do’. I agree only that the work that is needed (and has been noticeably missing for ~20 years) is much more broadly independent (aka skeptical) science that isn’t screened out by current CAGW biased gov’t funding organizations. I am not saying there have not been impacts from some significant independent (aka skeptical) scientists in the past ~20 years; there has been. I am saying it was intentionally underfunded if it is true that we have had a totally free marketplace for climate science (and related economic/industrial). That lack reasonably proportional amount of independent climate science is sufficient evidence of active manipulation of the free marketplace of scientific ideas by IPCC/gov’ts/media/scientific bodies who were guided/aided by ideological environmental groups; but to the credit of blogs like this that manipulation is now widely & publically recognized.
John
It’s just you. I’ve long since decided that allowing the warmists to get away with changing the term allows them to change the debate.
Apparently Greenpeace has a new boat.
It cost four times HI’s yearly budget.
http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2012-02/inside-brand-new-high-tech-rainbow-warrior
Regarding the subdebate here on “social equity”. From the context of the whole sentence: “The Pacific Institute will continue in its vital mission to advance environmental protection, economic development, and social equity.” – it obviously refers to the well established notion of three pillars of “sustanability”. Sustainability concerns precicely that: environmental protection, economic development, and social equity. Social equity in this context has precisely NOTHING to do with the notion of “left” political governance.
Sustainability Its just a way of encompassing all relevant effects of any human activity such as running a buisness, building a brige, driving your kid to school, or whatever. Relevant in the sense that they do matter in some way, but they do not necessarily have a clear pricetag or liability label on them.
To assess the sustainability performance of an activity lets take the example of driving your kid to school:
In the economic sense you achieve a desired function: transporting kid from point A to B. You also suffer economically, e.g. you pay for the gas and incremental value-loss of your car due to the driving. There are also more indirect economic effects but these are easy enough to consider as they directly affect your wallet. Now, your drive also produce effects in the environment and often indirectly on social equity issues. Such effects are often called “externalities”.
In the environmental sense you emit some gases and rubber tire particles to the environment that have (small, but still) unwanted effects such as toxic effect on organisms (including humans), global warming counted as kg CO2-equivalents is typically added here as an undesired environmental effect. But no one is held accountable in terms of paying for these “external” environmental effects. By using your car you also take advantage of all emissions and resource extracted from nature in order to build the car, the roads, produce the gas, the motoroil, etc.
The social equity aspect just means expanding the effects from not only covering traditional “environmental” effects but also effects on – you guessed it: social equity, i.e. human social phenomena that are considerered worthy of protection or establishment such as human rights, gender equity, ethnological equity, religouos equity, the right of kids to be kids, etc.
If parts of your car was produced by child labour on a next to nothing salary, your kid-to-school drive can be considered have a bad impact on social equity, given of course that you think underpaid child labor is a bad thing.
Now comes the most difficult part: how to compare all these effects? For example, how big is the cost of 3 hour of child labour compared to the cost of toxic effects due to air emission of 0.05 kg benzene-equivalent? It is ONLY in this sense of how things should be valued that any discussion of political values such as left-right policies has any bearing on sustainability. The effects will occur regardless of opinion. But people value the effects differently and it is a matter of preference and subjective choice. It is not inherent in the idea of sustainability that anyone must have adhere to a certain preset idea of what is good or bad. Sustainability assessment only acknowledges that in order to know if it is sustainable or not you must include some idea of what is a desired state of things including social equity issues.
So, assessing the sustainability of a given activity only means looking at ALL these effects: economic, environmental, and social – good and bad – paid for or not.
Now, please do not confuse my post of taking a stance for or against the concept of sustainability or any specific value on externalities, sustainability is only a perspective on things. Clearly the concept attracts “environmentalists” as they put a high value on environmental and socal equity impacts and it is a tool to assess responsibility for these effects.