Climate Propaganda, Climate Science Process

Who Wrote the Fake Heartland Strategy Memo?

162 Comments

Certainly Peter Gleick is still in the running.

But as I wrote in Forbes last week, the memo does not have the feel of having been written by a “player” like Gleick.  It feels like someone younger, someone more likely to take the cynical political knife-fighting statements of someone like Glieck (e.g. skeptics are anti-science) and convert them literally (and blindly) to supposed Heartland agenda items like trying to discourage science teaching.  Someone like an intern or student, who might not realize how outrageous their stilted document might look to real adults in the real world, who understand that leaders of even non-profits they dislike don’t generally speak like James Bond villains.   Even Megan McArdle joked “Basically, it reads like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic.  By an intern.”

Now combine that with a second idea.  Gleick is about the only strong global warming believer mentioned by the fake strategy document.   I don’t think many folks who have observed Heartland from afar would say that Heartland has any special focus on or animus towards Gleick (more than they might have for any other strong advocate of catastrophic man-made global warming theory).   I would not have inferred any such focus by Heartland, and seriously, who would possibly think to single out Peter Gleick of all candidates (vs. Romm or Hansen or Mann et al) in a skeptic attack strategy?

The only person who might have inferred such a rivalry would have been someone close to Gleick, who heard about Heartland mainly from Gleick.  Certainly Gleick seems to have had a particular focus, almost obsession, with Heartland, and so someone who viewed Heartland only through the prism of Gleick’s rants might have inferred that Heartland had something special in for him.  And thus might have featured him prominently in a hypothesized attack in their strategy document.

So this is what I infer from all this:  My bet is on a fairly young Gleick sycophant — maybe a worker at the Pacific Institute, maybe an intern, maybe a student.  Which would mean in turn that Gleick very likely knows who wrote the document, but might feel some responsibility to protect that person’s identity.

162 thoughts on “Who Wrote the Fake Heartland Strategy Memo?”

  1. I think your analysis is very likely correct and I doubt Gleick will ever let the cat out of the bag on the fake memo author. Based on his statement, he rationlizes his deception as being necessary to fight the “anti-science” of Heartland. I seriously believe he still thinks he has moral high ground on that. But even he knows that there is no high ground for forgery and fraud…

  2. The fake memo references details from the accounts documents – suggesting it was written after the accounts had been purloined – to “sex-up” an otherwise innocuous dossier.

    Couple that with the careful way Gleick’s legal team neither confirm nor deny whether the fake memo he distributed was the same document he “received anonymously in the mail”.

    Add in the fake memo’s use of Gleick’s idioms like “anti-climate” and random comma’s.

    Occam’s razor says Gleick wrote the fake smear memo

  4. Rum — I don’t think it is reasonable for someone to foresee that Gleick would go on a phishing expedition for theHeartland board package of docs.

    A denier would probably just assume that Gleick would continue his pattern of unsubstantiated statements. I.e., sending him a fake memo would have zero effect.

    I think Gleick wrote the memo. Even before he admitted to the phishing commenters at other blogs had noted the similarities between style and word choices of the fake memo and writings by Gleick.

    Peter Gleick has implied (but not explicitly claimed) that he did not write the fake memo. Unless we have some indication that he is not an ethical person, we should accept his carefully crafted semi-denial. Ooooooh. But we do have some indications of how extensive a case of noble cause corruption has has been infected with….

  5. It seems more like Gleick obtained the emails first, read the budget document that said “k-12 climate change education” and used that, and the other information within the other documents, to craft the fake document.

    I see it one of three ways.
    1. The fake document is real.
    2. Someone did what I described above and sent the fake document, forged by the very same information that Gleik had in the emails (unlikely).
    3. Gleik did it. I mean, what are the chances that the fake document would exactly make the data in Gleiks document? Hell of a coincidence.

  6. The recent, short statement from the Pacific Institute, revealing that Dr Gleick’s done nothing bad enough to be expelled from that ethical institution, was written by someone with a similar, carefree way with commas and conjunctions which we see in both the writings of Gleick and the fake Heartland memo: “For 25 years, the Pacific Institute has been committed to conducting research that advances environmental protection, economic development, and social equity and Dr. Gleick has been and continues to be an integral part of our team.” The comma really ought to follow and not precede “and social equity”.

  7. Let me get this straight. You’re saying Gleick is too smart to have written “Dr. Evil’s intern” letter. But he isn’t smart enough to see it as a fake when someone slipped it to him in a manila envelope?

  11. I tend to agree with the majority of commentators here that the evidence tends to point to Glieck rather than someone on his staff as the creator of fake document. Warrren’s argument reads like an attempt to give a another Forbes columnist a generous benefit of the doubt. It is not especially persusive, but I do appreciate the attempt to be charitable.
    I disagree with those who think that his onfession was crafted by a clever lawyer. If I were his lawyer and knew that he was innocent of the fabrication, I would have adviced him to lay out all the relavent facts in an unambiguous manner. His failure to this has fueled more reasonable speculation that points to his guilt. On the other hand, if I knew he had some degree of culpabilty regarding the fake memo, I would have advised him to say far less than what he did. Sure that might lead some to infer guilt, but the less disclosed the better if my client is facing possible civil or criminal liabilty. His limited confession has not helped him under either scenario.

  12. There are a couple of problems with a non Glieck author of the forgery. First the forgery paraphrases from the real Heartland docs. Which would indicate that the author had possession of the Heartland docs them self. Second in that lawyer crafted confession Dr. Glieck never once claims not to have written the forgery. And in a fairly exposing confession like that you would have thought he would eliminate that supposition. Instead he carefully avoids the topic of authoring it entirely.

    There is another problem he never actually tells us that the document he received that set him off was the fake strategy document. He implies that it was but never actually states that, again in the carefully lawyer constructed confession.

    Because of all that I lean towards Dr. Glieck as the most likely author of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Heartland.

    If it wasn’t him it was a close associate simply because it does use language fairly idiosyncratic to him. What is amazing is the people who say he was setup. I’m not seeing it, basically anyone claiming Dr. Glieck was setup is claiming that it was easily predictable that he would be inspired by such a forged memo to go on a crime spree.

    All that tends to lean against support of the idea that it was the forgery that was sent to him.

  14. I think Warren is wrong on this.

    Within a day of the memo being made public, people that know Gleik were already raising their eyebrows in his direction. The man has a peculiar writing style, and certain ways of wording phrases that were recognized. It looks amateurish, and is easily recognized as a forgery by people who aren’t it’s intended audience. His over the top verbal Snidely Whiplash mustache twirls play to people that already believe skeptics talk, and scheme that way in private amongst themselves. Let’s be honest…they’re eating it up. It’s a home run among those he intended the memo for.

    Lastly, let’s remember that Gleik has dipped his toes into character assassination in the recent past, and he was much lauded for his efforts in the AGW community then, and in my opinion, this was his attempt at a sequel, aimed at a broader audience.

  15. Papertiger:

    The Lucy Ramirez defense didn’t work for Dan Rather, and I doubt it’s going to prove any more successful for Peter Gleik.

  17. Waldo writes, “If the memo is, in fact, a fake, why so much concern?”
    Surely it should be a matter of public concern to track down and expose the faker? If this is not done he or she will probably continue to poison the debate with false information.

  19. ****”he or she will probably continue to poison the debate with false information.”

    I agree, Natalie. Should we also be as vigilant in tracking down denialists who disseminate false information or well-funded conservative political groups which pay scientists?

  20. “If the memo is, in fact, a fake, why so much concern?”

    The concern is simply to make sure that those who are interested in knowing are informed of the overwhelming evidence that it is a fake. Believe it or not, one warmists blogs is making a lame argument that it is authentic (i.e. http://www.desmogblog.com/evaluation-shows-faked-heartland-climate-strategy-memo-authentic) and Michael Mann,a prominent climate scientist “denier” is passing along the link.

  21. “Should we also be as vigilant in tracking down denialists who disseminate false information or well-funded conservative political groups which pay scientists?”

    Sure, it is called the marketplace of ideas. Go for it.

  22. Waldo has his head up his ass. Here’s your money pal. EPA gave Gleick’s group $468,000 in grants. Half a million dollars just given to pretexting Pete, no strings attached. Whose money was that? Oh it’s your money.

    I hope the motherfucker gets one of those black, affirmative action, judge in training, judges who hates white people, wants to get even, and “God Damn America”. Yeah we have those. They make you sign a waver saying, “I realize that Legal Clerk Mugabe isn’t an actual officer of the court, but am willing to allow him to decide my fate”.

  23. Steve McIntyre has obtained correspondence from Heartland about the chain of events and timeline incorporating Gleick’s crime:

    http://climateaudit.org/2012/02/23/heartlands-invitation-to-gleick-details/

    It turns out that Heartland invited Gleick to speak at their dinner, and he declined. Then he engaged in wire fraud, and likely identity theft/fraud.

    If this is the authentic trail of events, Gleick needs some serious time in the hoosegow with bubba.

  25. Waldo:  You really need to do your homework.  The Huffington Post relied upon software that attempts to identify the author of unknown document based on a comparison with documents of known authorship.

      HP used it to determine the unknown author of the stategy document based on comparisons with known writings of peter glieck, joe blast (Heartlands CEO), and Heartlands staff from the fundraising portion of the underlying documents.  The software apparently found joe blast the most likely author, staff next, gleick last.

    One big problem.  HP noticed that there was on sentence in the strategy memo that had been directly plagerized from the underlying documents.  It was properly excluded. However, HP didnt look too hard for other plagerized text.  As megan mccardle has noted: 

    “many of the sentences are cut and paste jobs from the fundraising document, the binder insert, or the budget documents.”

    So the relatively short strategy memo that was largely cut and pasted from a much larger body of  Heartland documents is determined by a computer to be suspicious similar to Heartland documents.  Nice piece of detective work there.

  26. Mr (soon-to-be convict) Gleick has the ironic hubristic balls to be highly concerned about taxpayer money

    ”Perhaps more importantly, the lack of
    transparency about the financial support for the
    Heartland Institute is at odds with my belief in
    transparency, especially when your Institute and
    its donors benefit from major tax breaks at the expense of the public.”

    which is laughable, since he exists almost solely because of it.

    I contribute to various think tanks, though not Heartland (I may shortly because of this), but if any of my information were put in the public sphere as a result of similar actions, I would directly come after him legally. Heartland is not subject to public disclosure, and they have chosen to discontinue disclosing donors, partially due to leftist harassment like Gleick (shocker). And disclosure of nonpublic information is most definitely legally actionable.

    I have a proposal for Mr Gleick:

    Let’s forget this ugly incident, and no charges filed.

    Going forward, the (extreme leftist) AGW community will abide by the same rules governing publicly traded corporations, specifically CEO certification, and criminal liability:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act#Sarbanes.E2.80.93Oxley_Section_906:_Criminal_Penalties_for_CEO.2FCFO_financial_statement_certification

    If you want to put extremist alarmism on the public agenda, at public cost, then you sign off on all of your work and release all of your data sets mandatorily. They are public record, as is your conduct, while you are employed at taxpayer expense, in any capacity, at any institution, anywhere in this country. If you commit fraud with the intent to deceive, which has been frequent to date, you will go to jail. If you engage in subversion to forward your agenda based on false information, you will go to jail. If you fail to disclose any information in the course of your research which directly impacts public funding decisions, you will go to jail.

    Heartland does not receive public monies; Mikey Mann et al do. Their public funding abuse will stop shortly.

  27. Reading your note I thought for a moment you were going to conclude Heartland wrote the note, and sent it to him anonymously to Gleick as a set up! I thought this is where you were heading when you wrote: “I would not have inferred any such focus by Heartland, and seriously, who would possibly think to single out Peter Gleick of all candidates” Heartland was in contact with Gleick right at that time with an invite to debate that Gleick declined. That’s one reason they might single him out, I guess.

    Anyway. I am sure it was not Heartland, but it would be a hell of a twist in this already extraordinary story.

  28. Paul, you must realize that you are looking for virtually any rationalization or reason, and you will simply believe what you want to believe. It’s funny, particularly considering how ultimately inconsequential this whole mess will be.

    Now, I’ll say this yet again: I have no ideas if the memo-in-question is fake or not (nor do I really care) but it would be silly at this point to definitively claim anything. It reads essentially like a memo, not artfully done but competent and corporate-speak enough to have been written by a bored and harried exec. Or it is hashed together by a hippy in Berkeley, an evil intern at the Pacific institute, or Gleick’s maid—but at this period of time any impartial jury would have vote reasonable doubt.

    But you, Paul D., being a denialist, have train-tracks that simply run one way.

  30. I wonder if paperkitty was drinking when he/she posted?

    Nah. I’m like this all the time. My only embellishment was the fictional clerk name “Mugabe” although that name gives an accurate impression of the competence and temperament of the cut cost “acting” judges. The situation is an all too real result of decades of Democrat run municipalities and chronic overspending.
    Perhaps you read of Vallejo’s bankruptcy? Then there’s Stockton on the verge. Lots of California cities on the cusp of insolvency.

    http://www.news10.net/news/article/180495/2/Stockton-could-follow-Vallejos-lead-and-file-for-bankruptcy

  31. I agree the fake memo is not to important in the overall scheme of things. The evidence remains overwheling that the memo is a fake the even with the little experiment reported by HP. Nevertheless if you want to maintain your open mind empty mind position that is fine with me. But in that event I dont see much point in your trolling on this site.

  33. Waldo says: “But you, Paul D., being a denialist, have train-tracks that simply run one way.

    Waldo: Calling me a denialist in the context of this discussion is a bit confusing. After all, it is you who is “denying” the overwhelming evidence that the strategy memo is a fake. Let me suggest an alternative to avoid such confusion that you can use to describe me: “anti-climate”.

    Now I understand that the term “anti-climate” is a highly unusual phrase that is ultimately meaningless. Is being “anti-climate” like being “anti-weather”? What does it mean? Who would think to use such phraseology?

    Well, that is why it is particularly apt in this discussion. It turns out that it is a phrase that Peter Gliek uses frequently in his writing to describe his opponents. OMG, he is even used it in the fake strategy memo he wrote when he writes: “This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.”

    “Anti-climate” has a nice sinister ring. Who wants to “anti” anything and it does sound pretty close to being “anti-climate science”, with all the bad connotations that would go with that. So you don’t have to worry the confusion that would be caused if Heartland would ever use the phrase to describe itself or its supporters.

    So how about it? Instead of calling me a “denialist”, why don’t you use “anti-climate”?

  34. I like “denailist.” I think that fits the mold better, not just in this case, but in all cases with an “overwhelming” amount of evidence. No offense to you personally. You are an intelligent, articulate fella. It just seems to me that you–as in the case of most of Myer’s Minions–will only accept one sort of “evidence,” and McArdle’s evidence is no more certain and no stronger than HP’s. And these are both highly conjectural and highly circumstantial and prove nothing on their own. The difference is that McArdle bolsters a denialistic need to demonize scientists.

    paperkitty you are one crazy cat.

  35. Waldo says: “as in the case of most of Myer’s Minions–will only accept one sort of “evidence,”

    I am all for considering all “the evidence” both in the context of “fakegate” and the broader issue of climate science.

    On “fakegate” you have offered only one bit of evidence–the HP computer analysis. The problem is that it turns out to be pretty weak as I have shown above. Your response: well I guess I am still waiting for any specifics you might have.

    I have previously provided you with two links to Megan McCardle’s analysis, but you have shown no evidence that you have actually read them. Megan McCardle, by the way, is generally in your camp on the broader climate issues and although her analysis is not exhaustive, it is a pretty good place to start. You seem to prefer maintain your “open mind, empty mind” position. Of course that does not prevent you from trolling on a thread devoted to this particular controversy

    On the broader climate issues your position as near as I can tell from other threads is that climate science is too complicated for you and you are not all that interested in doing the homework that would allow you to understand it. Therefore, you assert it is too complicated for everyone who is not a climate scientist to understand, including those who make the effort to become informed. Your position of relying on authority is reasonable for you, although it does not establish that your position is true. It is obviously a non-sequitor to suggest that it should apply to everyone.

  36. Read the McArdle pieces, Paul. Even briefly summarized them last thread back. It was very convincing and well thought-out, and I did note that she is very much in the alarmist camp. Still, not proof, no smoking gun, simply not. ‘Tis conjecture, Paul, no matter how much faith you put in it.

    As for my “position” (if you care, which I doubt you truly do, ’cause such is the nature of cyber-dialogue), I have no issue with people who are informed, particularly if they have science backgrounds. Boolah for them.

    But it is, firstly, as silly for an amateur in this day and age to second-guess a professional scientist (who has the time, resources, and training to devote to a subject) as it is for a patient to treat his or her own cancer above the advice of an oncologist; one will note, for instance, how angry Ted Rado gets if one even suggests there are other engineers in the world besides him (hyperbole of course)—yet Ted has no issue with challenging climate scientists. Typical of the denialist camp. In any event, the good peeps here are not generally very well read to begin with and take most of their information from the blogosphere. Which brings me to–

    Secondly, sites like CS are dedicated to political causes, not science. You can pretend otherwise, but this is a politically conservative site with only a passing interest in the science as a means of producing an agitprop.

  37. Waldo: “Still, not proof, no smoking gun, simply not. ‘Tis conjecture, Paul, no matter how much faith you put in it.”

    To just to be clear, I did note that you have attempted to move the goal from “there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt tht the memo is fake” to “there is proof beyond a reasonble doubt that Gliek is its author” I would endorse the former proposition, but not the latter.

    I suspect that you hold to a common fallacy that “proof” requires direct evidence–an eye witness or a confession. Of course this is not true. Cases that are presented in a courts frequently rely purely on circumstantial evidence to establish “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” Also please note that “proof beyond a resonable doubt” is not the same as “proof beyond the shadow of a doubt”.

    A fairly typical jury instruction on what is “reasonable doubt” will state it is: ” such doubt as would cause a reasonable person to hesitate before acting in a matter of importance.”

    I think there is no such doubt that the memo is fake. I understand you may hold a different opinion. Whenever a case goes to trial that would reflect that the opposing attorneys have different views on the state of the evidence. One side wins and the other side loses. I think you are on the losing side of this issue.

  38. And I think you are on the losing side of this issue: if it’s an honest jury, there is simply not enough to convict or determine. I suspect you are like a great many jurors and your mind was made up before you entered the jury box; you were convinced before you even read McArdle or the the memo itself for that matter.

    And I attempted to move no goals—you are getting caught on semantics and perhaps reading either too closely or not closely enough in an effort to poke holes in a very simple premise. The memo might be a fake, Gleick might be the author, Peter Blast might be the author, Obama might be the author, Warren Meyer might be the author, Satan might be the author—but there is simply no proof of any of this, neither of us was there. At this point we are left with only hypothesizing. Silly, like this conversation.

  40. This is getting very juicy.

    Courtesy of papertiger’s post, I was able to track back to Steve Milloy’s JunkScience site, where he had posted links to EPA grants to Gleick, which had mysteriously become inactive.

    Further down the chain, Milloy has since discovered, via an anonymous source, that these EPA grants and surrounding info, have been scrubbed, and that Milloy has screenshots.

    http://junkscience.com/2012/02/24/more-grants-to-gleick-scrubbed-from-epa-grants-database/

    It is possible that the screenshots are fake, and this is retribution for Heartland.

    Milloy has filed an FOIA request to find out definitively.

    If these records were scrubbed from the EPA site, and if there is an active campaign to destroy the connective trail between EPA and Peter Gleick, this would constitute government fraud, and likely result in impeachment proceedings against a sitting president were it shown that he directed the program, and quite possibly the subsequent coverup, which would be logical given Solyndra, et al.

    At the very least, it is a serious line of legal and political inquiry now.

  41. Waldo:  I dont know why I continue this silly conversation–I guess I find it kind of fun.

    I am glad to hear you have read the McCardle posts.  I went back to the last thread to review your “summary”.  It was a bit  threadbare to say the least. Are you sure you read them?

    I am curious as to what evidence you think supports the memo’s authenticity?  Its provenance is unknown.  It is not on Heartland letter head.  It uses a different font and format from the known authentic documents.  It is addressed to no one.  It is unsigned.  It does not contain any information that is not contained in the authentic documents except that it makes a few glaring mistatements of facts and adds a cartoonish negative spin to certain facts.  It contains numerous typos.  It  was scanned on the west coast shortly after Glieck received the authentic documents.  It has odd phrases as well as incorrect uses of commas and parentheses that are frequently found in Gleick’s writings and tweets. 

    As far as I can tell the only evidence that is authentic is that it claims internally to be from Heartland and a computer program found that the memo that was largely cut and pasted from Heartland documents has similarities to Heartland documents.  Did I miss anything?

  42. Waldo, I guess if I wanted to know how everyone else here thinks, you’re the go to guy for that?

  43. ****”I am curious as to what evidence you think supports the memo’s authenticity?”

    Never, ever said it was “authentic.” I know that’s what you want me to post. But all I’ve suggested is that any and all evidence, for or against its “authenticity” (or anything else for that matter), is entirely circumstantial—and that is enough for your a priori conclusions. I suspect you are going to repeat yourself again and again, round and round, as you waltz with your strawman.

    So you might stop salivating over McArdle’s photo long enough to read this. It’s interesting:

    http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/the_ugly_delusions_of_the_educated_conservative/

  45. Waldo, sorry we can’t get back to discussing co2 sensitivities and non existent water vapor amplifications right now, but Peter Gleick just crashed the Hindenburg. / Stolen and paraphrased from Lucia of the blackboard.

  46. One thing that’s kind of proofie, when “Heartland Insider” sent out his package to his 15 friends, he included the fake docs along with the real as being directly from the Heartland Institute.

    See what he did there? He undercut his Huffpo “confession” statement.

    Ouch.

  48. Waldo:  On the article, yes I am aware that liberals have a hard time understanding why intelligent conservative arent liberal and have been trying to explain it for years as some type of cognitive deficiency, the Salon article being one of just many such attempts.  Not surprisingly, intelligent conservatives think the attempts are kind of stupid and those who cannot identify the problems with such attempts are just not very bright.

  49. waldo: I understand that you want to be agnostic on the issue of authenticity. To maintain such a position, however, it seems that you would need some evidence to believe it is plausible to think the memo is authentic. That is what I am looking for: what is the evidence that causes you to think the authenticity of the memo is plausible?

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