The Fakegate Timeline – from soup to nuts

UPDATED: NEW TIMELINE FILES POSTED 2/29 3PM PST

There have been a number of different people working on timelines recently. Reader A. Scott has contributed a complete and highly detailed timeline of the Gleick Keystonian Caper aka Fakegate. It is presented here in entirety, both as a PDF file for easy viewing and emailing, and also as an Excel file for use as public resource tool. There’s also a timeline put together by Copner over at Lucia’s in this thread with his timeline document here. I present them both here for readers to evaluate and use. Note: since this is a complex document, reader input on any typos is welcome. – Anthony

Guest post by A. Scott

NOTES ON THE IMPETUS, EVENT, AND TIMELINE:

Dr. Peter Gleick has been mad at Heartland for years, but tweaked more so of late – fed up with Heartland, and with you (WUWT) and other “deniers”.  He was appointed head of AGU’s Ethics board – something he has pontificated about, while never understanding his role, that he is one of more polarizing figures himself – and now feels he has “power” to push his agenda.

The NCSE opportunity comes about – they are starting a heavy “Climate Change” education push, and intend to go after classroom AGW advocacy. Gleick sees chance to kill a lot of birds with one stone to push AGW agenda, get support to teach it in schools, and to hurt you, WUWT, “deniers” in general AND his long running enemy – Heartland.

Setting aside Mosher and the “crowd-sourced peer to peer review” that identified him as a suspect, Gleick could not have received the Heartland package until after 1/16/12 when the Board Meeting documents were first prepared.

And in reality he could not have received before 1/29/12 – as the  Board Directly was prepared 1/25/12 and the Meeting Minutes were prepared 1/29/12. Since they were all included in the package – he cannot have received the “pre-texted”  document package before 1/30/12.

And as the Strategy document included information directly from the Board Meeting documents – the earliest it could have been created was 1/16/12. Considering Mosher’s fingering him based on style, punctuation etc., it seems highly likely the Strategy document was prepared by Gleick after his receipt of the Heartland documents.

Penn State ran a multi-part “Climate Ethics” series from Jan 5 thru Feb 10, 2012.

NCSE released their “Defending Climate Science in Classroom” campaign early January – with rollout 1/13/12 thru 1/20/12 with Gleick announced as high profile participant, and also featured prominently in their rollout.

At the same time – Jan 13 thru 27 – Gleick was trading emails with Heartlands Joe Bast communications director Jim Lakely, who had offered Gleick chance to debate James Taylor – to continue their feud in person at Heartland function.   Gleick brought up Heartlands non-public donor list again 1/16 – a day before Heartlands Board meeting. On 1/27/12 Gleick finally turned Heartland down.

Gleick also has email exchange with Tamsin Edwards, because he dislikes her blog name questioning the “models”, which draws in Barry Woods, who has also had run ins with Gleick in past. Gleicks twitter comments, and emails, prompt David Appell, generally a warming advocate, to in early February, criticizing Gleick for essentially lying – telling him to “just tell the truth.”.

Barry Woods ends up in an extension of the email exchange between Gleick and Tamsin – posting the exchange online – and noting that Gleick complains about polarization, but fails to see that he is a big part of that issue.

Its easy to see the Gleick was becoming increasingly combative and agitated. In his 1/26/12 email to Woods he said he had:

“…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.

Within a few days of this exchange we know he pre-texted Heartland and received the documents, and the rest is history.

It is very interesting that DeSmog, Think Progress, Forbes and Huffington all come up involved with or commenting on Gleick during all this as well – especially regarding the NCSE “Defending Climate in Classroom” program.

Then there is the proof that DeSmog could not have only had the documents for an hour as they told Politico.

The timeline shows (and Mosher said he had other support confirming)  that the documents were received about 9:15am PST. One of Littlemore’s documents has a Modified date at 9:59AM PST, meaning he had to have received before then, and then saved it. DeSmog posted the stories at 1:13 (Demelle) and 1:14pm EST (Littlemore) – which means they had documents at least 4 hours.  It seems HIGHLY unlikely they both, along with Think Progress, all could have written the detailed stories that appeared if they only had docs for an hour … much more to investigate there I think.

METADATA

Here is basic metadata I compiled from various files. I compared the docs Littlemore uploaded, as they appear to be same as what is at ThinkProgress and Greg Laden.

The original files were uploaded by DeMelle in the first DeSmog Blog story – DeMelle’s files are the original “clean” versions … and appear to be “as received” posted unchanged.

Littlemore re-uploaded his own copy of the files to DeSmog’s servers and because they already existed with same filenames, a duplicate file was created – hence the (2), (3) etc appended to file names.

I don’t think there is any useful inference gained from review of Littlemore’s docs other than that it gives valuable insight into WHEN DeSmog got the documents.

Likewise, as they appear to be grabbed from Littlemore (note the file names match – they have the appended numbers) I don’t believe the Laden or ThinkProgress versions offer any real benefit – except, again, by looking at any modify dates in their files we can see when they received them as well.

The bottom line … ONE of the Littlemore files has a Modified Date of 9:59AM PST. Using all the evidence available (the DeSmog post times, tweets, Facebook posts etc) it appears DeSmog’s server or publishing platform is set to MST and in reality it is pretty certain they posted the stories at 1:13 and 1:14pm PST respectively for DeMelle’s and Littlemore’s versions.

If the “Insider email was sent at 12:13pm as claimed by Keith Kloor via David Appell’s blog, it cannot (as we now know to be true) have come direct from Heartland in the Central time zone – that would be 10:13am PST.

From all this we can confirm that DeSmog’s statements to Politico – that they had the documents for just an hour before posting the story – is completely false. In fact I believe we can see evidence at a clumsy attempt to fabricate evidence to support that Politico claim.

Since Littlemore’s save (Modified) date was 9:59am and they posted the story at a little after 1pm PST – we know the Politico claim must be false. We also can deduce, from the fact that ThinkProgress first posted the story at 3:10pm EST/12:10pm PST (or more likely, based on other evidence actually at 2:10pm EST/11:10am PST), the Insider email cannot have come from the PST time zone as 12:13PST would be 3:13 EST – AFTER the post time of the ThinkProgress story.

So where was the Insider email sent from?

In order for the known timing to work; the 9:59am PST “save” date from Littlemore at DeSmog, and the 3:10pm EST (or most likely 2:10pm EST) posting time for the ThinkProgress story … assuming the 12:13pm date offered by Kloor via Appell is accurate – the Insider email had to have been sent from the Eastern Standard time zone … 12:13pm EST is two hours prior to ThinkProgress’ earliest possible publication date, and would be 9:13am PST – which comports with the 9:59am PST “save” time by Littlemore.

The question is – who sent it – as Peter Gleick is based on the West Coast?

To find the answer you have to follow a little bird ….

Amused – you need to be careful to separate the DeSmog files – the DeMelle versions uploaded with the first story at 1:13pm PST and the Littlemore versions he re-uploaded with the 2nd story.

The Demelle versions are the same files as on ThinkProgress and the file modified dates are unchanged from the created dates. The Littlemore files (also again, at Laden’s) are the ones with the changed modified dates – to 2/14.

We can be thankful the Keystone cop team at DeSmog did do the two uploads – that Littlemore DID blunder and change the files …. if he hadn’t we would not know they had the files on or before 9:59am PST on 2/14.

Which shows conclusively that DeSmog wasn’t truthful with Politico when they said they had the files for only an hour before posing them.

I think its likely that DeSmog INTENTIONALLY re-saved the 2nd version of the files – they were all saved at 12:36-12:38pm PST with one at 12:55pm PST – they posted the stories at 1:13 and 1:14pm PST. This would show the Politico statement was true.

I think it was an deliberate, planned attempt at a deception to try and provide support for their alleged timeline.

They wanted the world to believe the Insider email was sent, he could say look at these files, we uploaded them when we got them.

Littlemore’s copies of documents posted have all been re-saved since creation date:

Littlemore Strategy DOC:

PDF-1.5

x:xmptk=”Adobe XMP Core 5.2-c001 63.139439, 2010/09/27-13:37:26

pdf:Producer>EPSON Scan

xmp:ModifyDate>2012-02-14T12:36:20-08:00 (2/14 – 12:36 PST)

xmp:CreateDate>2012-02-13T12:41:52-08:00

xmpMM:DocumentID>uuid:0d826409-6a19-411c-ae09-b5f400186c52

xmpMM:InstanceID>uuid:e5477a6f-aa33-4521-b161-1ae07ed0a258

DeSmog Strategy DOC:

PDF-1.4

x:xmptk=”Adobe XMP Core 5.2-c001 63.139439, 2010/09/27-13:37:26

pdf:Producer>EPSON Scan

xmp:ModifyDate>2012-02-13T12:41:52-08:00 (2/13 – 12:41 PST)

xmp:CreateDate>2012-02-13T12:41:52-08:00

xmpMM:DocumentID>uuid:0d826409-6a19-411c-ae09-b5f400186c52

xmpMM:InstanceID>uuid:692440ef-d85e-4cec-afef-742d339ece7b

ThinkProgress Startegy DOC:

PDF-1.4

x:xmptk=”Adobe XMP Core 5.2-c001 63.139439, 2010/09/27-13:37:26

pdf:Producer>EPSON Scan

xmp:ModifyDate>2012-02-13T12:41:52-08:00 (2/13 – 12:41 PST)

xmp:CreateDate>2012-02-13T12:41:52-08:00

xmpMM:DocumentID>uuid:0d826409-6a19-411c-ae09-b5f400186c52

xmpMM:InstanceID>uuid:692440ef-d85e-4cec-afef-742d339ece7b

All of the Littlemore DOCS compared:

Fundraising:

xmp:ModifyDate>2012-02-14T09:59:58-08:00 (2/14 – 09:59:58 PST)

xmp:CreateDate>2012-01-16T10:02:55-06:00

Agenda:

xmp:ModifyDate>2012-02-14T12:36:02-08:00 (2/14 – 12:36:02 PST)

xmp:CreateDate>2012-01-16T10:46:43-06:00

Littlemore Strategy DOC:

xmp:ModifyDate>2012-02-14T12:36:20-08:00 (2/14 – 12:36:20 PST)

xmp:CreateDate>2012-02-13T12:41:52-08:00

Board Directory:

xmp:ModifyDate>2012-02-14T12:36:51-08:00 (2/14 – 12:36:51 PST)

xmp:CreateDate>2012-01-25T15:04:36-06:00

Budget:

xmp:ModifyDate>2012-02-14T12:37:56-08:00 (2/14 – 12:37:56 PST)

xmp:CreateDate>2012-01-16T10:00:38-06:00

BINDER:

xmp:ModifyDate>2012-02-14T12:38:39-08:00 (2/14 – 12:38:39 PST)

xmp:CreateDate>2012-01-16T11:06:01-06:00

Board Meeting Package:

xmp:ModifyDate>2012-02-14T12:55:23-08:00 (2/14 – 12:55:23 PST)

xmp:CreateDate>2012-01-16T10:48:58-06:00

=============================================================

Here are the documents illustrating the timeline:

(Note, as can happen with any complex document, just after publishing here, a small error was discovered in these files, where Heartland/Bast is referenced for email exchanges, it should be Heartland/Lakely) This error doesn’t affect the timeline itself. Mr. Scott is offline at the moment – so I’ll wait for him to provide an update. – Anthony)

FAKEGATE_TIMELINE_ASCOTT_rev2-24-12

FAKEGATE_TIMELINE_ASCOTT_rev2-24-12

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UPDATED FILES POSTED ON 2/29

FAKEGATE_TIMELINE_ASCOTT_rev2-28-12

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FAKEGATE_TIMELINE_ASCOTT_rev2-28-12

(XLS) Requires Excel or Open Office or Excel Viewer (free here)

(XLS) Requires Excel or Open Office or Excel Viewer (free here)