Thursday
Feb232012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill The comedy of fakers
Feb 23, 2012 Climate: fakegate Hilariously, DeSmog appears to have decided to try to uphold the line that the fake Heartland strategy document is real. I'm struggling to keep my jaw off the floor.
In response, Anthony Watts has launched a crowdsourced textual analysis project to see if science will provide backup to Mosher's observations about the similarities between the literary styles of the counterfeiter and Peter Gleick. You can find out how to take part here.
It's a good idea, but I'm worried that nobody is going to be able to stop laughing at DeSmog for long enough to take part.
Reader Comments (81)
DeSmogblog is pursuing a very high risk strategy, all right. In the event that "someone" eventually comes forward and admits to forging the suspect document DeSmogBlog are going to look even more ridiculous. In fact, I am not sure how they could survive this with any sort of credibility left intact.
Having said that, I am conscious that the authorship of that document is still very much up for grabs, in theory, at least. Why fall into the same trap as DeSmogBlog and nail your colours to the mast at this stage? The whole debacle is still evolving in an entirely satisfactory way without anyone having to do that.
Sit back and enjoy the show.
Contrast that with how a professional journalist would view such a document:
"Nor would I ever, ever claim that a document came from Heartland unless I had personally received it from them, gotten them to confirm its provenance, or authenticated it with multiple independent sources."
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/some-more-thoughts-on-heartland/253449/
But at least we're all agreed that Gleick wrote Shakespeare's plays.
Such articles are wonderful: The likelihood of the document being fake is very high indeed and once this is proved (I was going to say 'beyond question' but to some it never will) it will do great damage what limited credibility the likes of Desmog has outside of their own echo chambers.
A great tool to beat them down with. But thats for the future. As jack Savage siggests, some care needs to be taken at this stage to avoid a face-egg meeting of our own.....
It is amazing isn't it? They are selling this crap to no one but themselves. It's like the last days of a ponzi scheme. Shear delusion.
This kind of reminds me of the crowd-sourcing that occurred about the Dan Rather TANG memos. The point here, however, is that we don't actually have to prove the strategy document is faked - the Heartland Institute already said it was - it is up to Desmuger et.al. to prove they are true. What WUWT is doing is trying to determine whether or not, styistically, the author was Gleick. Pretty much what Mosher was doing, but using a COMPUTER MODEL. And we know that the warminsta crowd doesn't argue with computer models.
Of course the mistake you are all making is that desmog had any credibility to start with. Thru didn't! But that's the creationists for you.
I see that they are also pinning their hopes to a discovery process if this gets to court, certainly that's what Baghdad Black is hoping for (and I note that clown is still referring directly to the faked document as if it was real).
Anyway, the creationists are desperate BUT we need to realise they are preaching to the converted. They are spinning solely for, and to, those who believe their every word.
Regards
Mailman
The authorship of the climate strategy document may still be an open question, but it is crystal clear that it is not an official HI document. It seems odd to me that DeSmogBlog can countenance the idea that HI should set out in its climate strategy document details of a donation that are contradicted in their own funding memo. This is easily verifiable.
We are looking at a conspiracy to defame.
It is becoming apparent that DeSmog knew the source, Peter Gleick, and corresponded with Gleick prior to publication. It is also possuble that the Gleick's 14 other friends did they same. It could even be the case that DeSmog even had a hand in producing the fake written by Gleick (there is no doubt on that). I think that is why DeSmog are trying to convince the foolish (Michael Mann, etc) that they are innocent on all counts.
I think this is good because DeSmog, Mann et al are all going to be tarred by Gleick's brush. Gleick has destroyed his credibilty. Richard Black destroyed what was left of his credibility yesterday, and now others are in the process of destroying theirs; and all by their own hands.
No one is going to listen to climate scientists and eco-zealots, and a combination of both, who claim this document is authentic. No one is going to believe what these people have to say either on climate science.
We are not dealing with a noble cause anymore, we are dealing with a lost cause.
What am I missing here? Desmogs defence seems to be that the fake contains phrases either directly lifted or paraphrased from genuine Heartland documents so it must in fact be genuine. Well thats certainly an interesting hypothesis. Another hypothesis might be that a faker (let the symbol 'Glieck' stand for faker) copied & pasted bits from genuine Heartland docs and added a few flourishes of his own. Desmog however struggles to understand the concept of competing hypotheses: any view other than their own is just NOT TRUE, and is perpetrated by wicked, rich, organised people who have no love for Gaia or the grandkiddies.
The thing I find most ironic is the extent to which Peter Gleick got all worked up about Tamsin's choice of blog name AllModelsAreWrong.com being a "big, big mistake"
I think we can safely say that what's he's done was a rather bigger mistake, to say the least....
Reading again to the bottom of Tamsin's write-up of the conversation, one wonders whether Jonathan Jones's exceptionally wise comment to Tamsin, myself and Gleick
will turn out to be remarkably prescient.
The parallels to Watergate are rather uncanny. This is a political crime, and I've got a feeling that those people that consider him a hero are not inclined to hold Nixon in the same regard.
In 1972, Nixon's Republican Party was easily winning in the polls, and yet someone decided it would be a good idea to steal the Democratic Party's strategy documents.
Here we have a similar story, the group rolling in public funds, with access to all levels of government decides to steal the strategy documents of a political foe. Nothing Heartland is doing is illegal, they have a right to lobby government, to seek donations and to pay people to do work on their behalf. None of the stolen documents reveal any illegal actions on behalf of Heartland, all they reveal is that they are easily outmatched financially by their opponents.
Worse than the Watergate crimes, in this case not only are the private documents stolen by impersonating a company executive, one document is "sexed up" and distributed as an authentic representation of Heartland's activities. Even today, people are commenting as if this document is authentic.
Already the group has circulated the names of people on the Heartland payroll and donor list, so they can continue with the brown-shirt tactics of smearing them, having them excluded from office and destroying their careers.
DeSmogBlog on the Koch donation:
Apart from the assumption that the person authoring the Climate Strategy document should commit such a clumsy and unprofessional error, this doesn't explain why the Koch donation should mentioned at all in the context of climate strategy, given that this was towards the HCN project (Health Care) as clearly shown in the undisputed funding memo.
It would appear that the American The National Center for Science Education (NCSE), of which Peter Gleick had recently joined the board, were very quick off the mark to comment on the publication of these documents.
Mark S. McCaffrey, programs and policy director at NCSE said on the 14th Feb, "the Heartland documents continue to promote confusion, doubt and debate where there really is none."
Was the NCSE given a heads up by its newest board member?
Well the very next day NCSE members were tweeting that they could make money out of what they called "Deniergate", a name used only by climate alarmists.
So Fakegate was seen by the NCSE as a money making proposition. When was that originally proposed and by who?
I have a bad feeling about this. It is as plain as a pikestaff that the genuine HI documents revealed no "secret", or morally dubious agenda. It is also clear to reasonable people that the "strategy" document is a fake.
What concerns me is that we are not dealing with "reasonable" people, but desperate zealots who, with their friends in the media, will stop at nothing to "spin" this story.
That this is already occurring is demonstated by the antics at DeSmogblog and by the disgraceful actions of Richard Black.
The simplest way of testing the authenticity of a document is Bluebottle's method of holding it up to his ear.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tjHlFPTwVk
This has just got even more interesting.
The strategy document DeSmog is pointing to IS A DIFFERENT DOCUMENT (h/t to Morph on WUWT).
Here are the changes:
The Modified time has changed from Mon Feb 13 12:41:52 2012 to Tue Feb 14 12:36:20 2012.
The format of the original was PDF-1.4 and this has now changed to PDF-1.5.
The Document instance UUID has changed from 692440ef-d85e-4cec-afef-742d339ece7b to e5477a6f-aa33-4521-b161-1ae07ed0a258
I've compared the internal document images from the original and the new one and they are exactly the same. This indicates it is not a new scan, but is probably the old scan repacked in a new PDF.
Sensational! Where did they get that from?
Hi Richard: I do think J Jones encapsulated it in a single tweet.
Pete Glieck being upset with Tamsins blog name,not least because sceptics (me)liked it as well as UK scientists, has a follow up story where Tamsin said to Peter:
"Of course, if communication of climate science is not your aim, then it is your choice if you prefer to communicate with nobody!"
Peter was 'telling' Tamsin (and I guess uk scientists) how they should communicate climate change , AND who to talk to. Tamsin very clearly told him she wthought here communication strategy was better and she will communicate with who she like.!!
(with apologies about WUWT ref, I did explain that WUWT's PR has been run by his 'enemies' (Romm's, Desmogblogs, etc), and she might have a few pre-conceptions based on that.
(lets forgive her on that one,)
http://www.realclimategate.org/2012/02/clarifications-and-how-better-to-communicate-science/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Tamsin Edwards
Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2012 6:29 PM
To: Peter H. Gleick Cc: Barry Woods
Subject: Re: Clarification
Dear Peter,
Just a quick note.
One of the most important things I have learned in my (fairly extensive) public engagement activities is not to lump people together in a homogenous group. I repeatedly defend Barry because he works hard *not* to be Anthony Watts.
I hope you’ll consider taking each person and their views on their ownmerits, or lack of, in future conversations. I would personally be infuriated if I was dismissed on account of the behaviour of a group of people I talk with. Every single person I talk with has a different viewpoint, and I learn a lot about how better to communicate climate science by listening to them. If we dismiss swathes of people by association then our attempts at communication become futile: we end up only ‘preaching to the converted from an ‘ivory tower’, as it were.
Of course, if communication of climate science is not your aim, then it is your choice if you prefer to communicate with nobody!
My best wishes,
Tamsin
————————————————————————-
From: Peter Gleick
Sent: 26/01/2012 18:13
To: Barry Woods;Tamsin Edwards
Barry,
Again, I am not going to spend more time on this, but I will try to be clear. My comments about your communications with me were not meant to suggest that you were either abusive or threatening to me in the nature of the kinds of emails/comments Hayhoe (or I or others in the climate community regularly receive).
You have not been so far as I know, and *I will try to make that clear in a tweet, when I get a chance*. And perhaps “incredibly annoying” or “incredibly frustrating” or “incredibly discourteous,” or “incredibly uncivil” or some other synonym would have been a better choice. Do you really want me to pick one?
I stand by my other comments in the email I sent to you, about how 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.
Perhaps you’re having more luck, or have more patience.
Peter Gleick
FakeGate is blossoming into a wonderfully ornate miniature of the entire CAGW debate.
It's a thing of beauty, really, the way ones attention is simultaneously drawn to multiple, interwoven and interlinking strands of dishonesty, deception, fabrication and forgery at all discernible scales.
A microcosm, that's the word.
I am Morph on WUWT and I noticed it had a (3) at the end of the name this morning when I experimented with the analysis software. I doubt it means anything though.
It may be significant or it may not - Windows just adds a number to a file name when you do copy and paste into the same place - they may have done it so they could, er, "amend" it but not naming it back seems very stupid.
Follow up - its not significant, the original DeS-blog entry lists it with a (3) on the end. Another one has a (2) on the end though, does this mean it might be "questionable" too ?
Chris
Even if the content is the same this may be significant. Either someone has sent another copy to DeSmogBlog since the drama started (which is not very likely), or they have had multiple copies of the fake document all along. It becomes more difficult for them to pose as an innocent party.
Chris
Does this suggest collaboration?
You can see Gleicks rage at his impotence in his email to Barry Woods above. People are simply not getting his message and have the temerity to disagree
Well he was going to show us wasn't he?
This is all wonderfully entertaining.
Re: Chris
It is significant because it is a different document.
What this indicates is that DeSmog has the raw scan and has repacked it into a new PDF.
In other words he probably has a TIFF image of the scanned document and has saved it as a PDF.
This would mean that either Gleick sent the TIFF image and DeSmog saved it as PDF for distribution or DeSmog scanned the document.
I think they could be laughing too. The guys behind Desmog are millionaires and will continue to be - Gleick's taking the heat, rightly. The ship is sinking and they've decided to pop the corks and go down having some fun.
Chris,
> Another one has a (2) on the end though
Can you post a link and I will check and see if it is a different document?
So was this document being bounced back forth in the ether in different formats before it was finalised fit for publication?
Peter Glieck a few weeks ago.
http://ncse.com/climate-change/leading-climate-change-expert-joins-ncse-board
"Climate change isn't just a science issue, says Gleick. It's a socio-political-economic issue. "I would roll climate change into every relevant class, from physics and biology to economics and political science. We're irreversibly committed to climate change, and we'd better understand how it works and what we can do slow and diminish the now unavoidable impacts."
Why is Gleick backing NCSE's new initiative? Scientists aren't always very good at communicating the importance of science, says Gleick. Communicating science is NCSE's specialty.
"I'm delighted that NCSE is taking on the climate change education component," says Gleick. "If NCSE can do for climate change what it has done for evolution education, policy makers may finally get in line to do what they should be doing."
BW
What intrigues me is the NCSE's part in Fakegate when they initially thought they could make money out of it. Who could deliver such a monetary godsend to kickstart their own entry into teaching kids about the dangers of climate change?
TerryS,
you're assuming a level of competence that is probably beyond Gleick and DeSmogBlog.
My guess is that they received the document in email from Gleick, PRINTED IT OUT, 'cos they're environmentalists after all, then RE-SCANNED it 'cos that's how you get a PDF to put on the web site.
See - not malicious - just thick.
Has anybody considered the fact that maybe the whole saga was a Desmoblog + Gleick Project from the very start?
So Gleik was backing the NCSE's education program to get climate change into every science subject, funny how one of the items in the fake document was about teaching science. Really.
The document has a redacted header, looks like the content was either blanked out on the scanner or removed afterwards. They should reproduce the unaltered original document.
Apart from the internal evidence that the strategy document is a fake (the odd choice of language, the misdescription of the Koch donations, the lack of attribution to an author, etc), I think considerable weight should be given to the fact that the HI denounced it as a fake. Of course, to the warmist camp such a denial carries no weight, because the HI are evil conspirators against the public good, capable of any amount of dishonesty to protect themselves. But to anyone with an open mind, consider the following points:
a. if genuine, the strategy document would have been circulated to an unknown number of board members and senior staff. At least some of these are academics and other people with a reputation and professional standards to maintain. The denial of authenticity of the document would only be sustainable if *all* of those who had seen it were willing to conspire indefinitely in a cover-up. This is a high-risk approach.
b. If genuine, copies of the document, or computer files of relevant drafts, etc, would probably also be available to various less senior staff. Unless security and vetting of staff was exceptionally tight, there would be a high risk that one or more of these would send incriminating documents, supporting the authenticity of the document, to the press. Since at the time of the denial there had just been a serious breach of security - the release of the 'genuine' documents - it would be very foolish to suppose that the cover-up would not unravel.
c. At the time of the HI's denunciation of the 'fake', on the 14th or 15th February - long before Gleick's 'confession' - the HI would not have known exactly what documents had been released or who had received them, or what other information might have been passed on orally. Again, denouncing the strategy document as a fake if in fact it was genuine would be a high risk approach.
d. It would be unnecessary to take all these risks. Although the 'fake' document does not paint the HI in a flattering light, most of the damage lies in a few details of wording, such as the reference to discouraging teachers from teaching science. If the document were genuine, it would be easy for any half-competent PR team to suggest ways of limiting the damage: the document was just a draft for discussion, it had not been adopted as policy of the HI, the wording was clumsy but not the policies were legitimate, and so on.
I will not dignify with discussion the suggestion that the document was 'faked' by the HI itself as a means of discrediting Gleick or warmists generally, a theory that would take us still further into the realms of fantasy.
Like Don Keiller, I too have a bad feeling about all this. Desmog know the document in question is faked. They know they will eventually have to withdraw it. However, the longer they can continue to make political capital out of it the better, in their view. What Desmog and others are trying to do is drive the “truthfulness” of the memo so far into the psyche of their followers and the believers generally, that it won’t matter that it’s fake - and they are succeeding! Note the process of how Gleick is not only being forgiven for his lying but is actually becoming a positive hero because of it. Note how Revkin, for example, is already being forced to backtrack on the comments he made when Gleick first confessed. Note how pressure is already being exerted on Microsoft (and no doubt every other company and private donor named in the genuine docs) to withdraw their contributions to Heartland. Note too, the pressure Greenpeace are now putting on the employers of the various scientists named in the docs as having done any work on behalf of Heartland, one of them being Indur Goklany who left comments on this very blog the other day on the “Entrepreneur” thread.
The consequences of all this are going to be far reaching and will have major impacts. Heartland may well not survive, regardless of what happens in any future court case. Other think tanks are almost bound to be caught in the fall-out. Any hope any of us had for a more balanced view of climate change being taught to our children has now gone for sure. Any attempt by anybody (certainly in the UK or US) to introduce any tools that might help our children make properly informed decisions on this subject will be decried as a right-wing, Heartland type intervention and won‘t even get considered. Some people may well lose their jobs, purely because of their connection to Heartland, however tenuous.
We can all sit here at our computers and laugh at the current antics - and I’m all for a good laugh - but while we’re doing that, others are busy using the current situation to reinforce the hold they already have on government and it’s agencies, the press and the media.
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.
I think I agree with Don. Although it may seem funny at first, the kind of fanatical extremism illustrated by these people is really quite worrying.
David, LC -
I do not think that is the case. It may describe their modus operandi (this is what they do and have always done), but reinforcing failure of this magnitude is hugely counter-productive because it seriously damages their cause, their science, their belief system.
Everyone is either laughing at DeSmog or grimacing in response.
My own response is that Gleick and DeSmog are both guilty parties - they colluded, they conspired to defame HI. If they think that Michael Mann chipping in with his tuppence worth is further proof of authenticity-by-pronouncement then they are also deluded.
The only danger that may arise from Fakegate is that others will attempt to follow Gleick's path and commit reputational and career suicide for the cause (now lost), so leading to instant green martyrdom and deification.
I would imagine at this very moment that those with connections to both Gleick and DeSmog and with reputations to protect will be doing their very best to put as much distance as the can between themselves and these eco-zealots.
I think LC may be right. But it's also possible this stuff is going down because the Warmers are frustrated that they haven't taken over the world yet at the pace they'd prefer, and feel something significant needs to happen.
They are bored.
Andrew
@Mac and Terry - It is puzzling, I don't think I've uncovered anything new though - the contents (from comments at Watts) are the same as the previous one.
An important question that strikes me now is "are the documents available via DSB the actual ones they received or did they amend any of them ?"
Also if Gleik used a GMail account he may have deleted it but have Google ? If not then the sent documents will still be there - somewhere ? Maybe ?
The comments at DeSmog and Climate Progress are chilling. Their level of detachment from reality is startling. What springs to mind is Dostoevsky's The Possessed.
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 ;)
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.
PDF is not an editable document format. You can send, receive, view, print and even cut and paste from them. None of these actions will change the modification time (a META property of the file). The modification time for those who receive the PDF will be exactly the same as for those who sent it.
If, however, you had a Word document and exported it multiple times as a PDF it would have different modification times.
The conclusion I draw from this is that DeSmog has the documents in a different format than PDF and has saved them to PDF’s multiple times.
The question is: WHERE DID THEY GET THEM FROM?
"The document has a redacted header"
That will be the name of the hotel...
TerryS
Did someone ask the question, "Are we good to go with this format?"
If the pessimists here are to be believed we are facing nothing short of an attempt to roll back the scientific revolution, and that in the name of "science"!
Maybe this is so, but I think the attempt is indicative more of weakness than strength. Gleick's frustration in getting his apocalyptic message across seems real enough to me. The contortions of the faithful to persuade themselves and others that the obviously fake strategy document is real, show that for them ideology trumps reason and evidence. They may choose to go out on a limb for this - or maybe they have no real choice - but others will be distancing themselves.
The Communist party didn't want for support after the invasion of Hungary, but those who stayed in the party knew what they were committing to.
TerryS
I can confirm this. I just pulled down a copy from DeSmog.org and it is the PDF1.5 format. But I have a copy I took on Feb 21 (two days ago) and it is in the PDF 1.4 format. Since you can simply change the extension of the file from "pdf" to "txt" and effectively make it "text" document, it would be fun to do a gdiff on the two. I don't have gdiff on my system as I stopped doing software development. But it would be interesting to see what did change.
Fakegate has just taken an new twist. For what reason did they run the file through a PDF program yet again? And to think that there aren't copies of the older version out there all over the place just goes to show how stupid these people are.
Oh, the pain poor George Soros must be going through with all these idiotic maneuvers. With friends like this, who needs enemies.
Couldn't happen to a nicer guy, really.
My interpretation of the two Desmog versions is as follows. Brendan Demelle and Richard Littlemore wrote independent posts on Heartland. The articles were posted within one minute of one another. Demelle and Littlemore had each received versions of the documents from Gleick and each independently saved the documents. In a few cases, Littlemore in particular seems to have opened the pdf and saved the open version, thereby changing the time. This tightens the chronology a little -see my timeline at CA - but I would suggest not reading anything more than that into this information.