Bishop Hill Heartland says key memo was fake
Feb 15, 2012 Climate: Sceptics Climate: fakegate Climate: other This just has just been posted (link).
The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.
Since then, the documents have been widely reposted on the Internet, again with no effort to confirm their authenticity.
One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.
Bishop Hill
In related news, Revkin reports that they are genuine. You have to laugh.
Bishop Hill
On the ball as ever, Richard Black appears to have posted his story on the Heartland docs after they were declared fake. BBCScience has just tweeted a leak to his story. The declaration of inauthenticity is recent enough to rule out malfeasance, but I think a smile is warranted.
Reader Comments (136)
This extract from the fake document is worth repeating:
A basic rule of campaigning (indeed of life) is not to believe your own propaganda. The warmists keep shouting that sceptics are "anti-science" - OK, that might be good knockabout stuff. But they believe it: they believe it likely that a body like Heartland would actually produce a formal document about "dissuading teachers from teaching science". Pathetic.
I vote for FakeGate.
Shx,
We have been over why organisations like GPWF would want to keep the names of their donors private in a previous thread. One reason that springs to mind is their personal safety.
Russell,
Apart from the HI having already released a press statement on the documents, they owe thefogsmog nothing. Besides, you and I know thefogsmog wouldn't believe anything the HI says anyway.
Mailman
@sHx
Lulu is the fragrant Louise Gray. Her skills do not extend much beyond cut and pasting other's work....
Hahahahah sorry haven't been able to stop laughing since I started reading about this this morning.
Zealots really are Zealots aren't they.
'Lalala, I can't hear you'
'There fake, as in not real'
LALALA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU'
'Fakegate' is OK but hard to say - there's an inelegant hard stop right in the middle 'Fake Gate'.
I propose 'Fakergate', which sounds a lot easier.
Desmog_gate?
Agree with Latimer, fakergate is better. But I also like desperategate. What about a composite: desperatefakergate?
Okay, probably too long.
Fauxgate?
+1 to SuckerGate
@Will Nitschke
Essentially I was just trying to emphasise that in accepting funding from outside the "politically correct" sources, sceptical scientists (and Prof Carter is surely a scientist even by the rarefied standards of the warmists) leave themselves exposed to the sorts of hypocritical ad hominem attacks so beloved of the CAGW faithful as so admirably represented by the Guardian, BBC, Australian ABC, and so on.
As I thought I'd made clear in subsequent paras, this is not to suggest that I think Prof Carter and Anthony Watts are guilty of anything on the mere suggestion that some sources of funding are beyond the warmist pale.
re feb 16 @3:46 The Leopard in the Basement : "Do you have any real evidence they are lying about what (to my eyes anyway) is a pretty unambiguous statement?"
Yes:
They could falsify the hypothesis that they are not telling the truth about the document in question by releasing the original e-mail containing the document itself.
They have not done so.
Lovely, we now have the Protocols of the Elders of Climate Denial.
This one will run and run.
Russell
Interesting you started off by eluding to Clinton's definition of what "is" is, implying that HI are not being straight in their statements.
To Which I said
Let me help you out.
un·am·big·u·ous - Adjective: Not open to more than one interpretation.
con·vo·lut·ed - Adjective: (esp. of an argument, story, or sentence) Extremely complex and difficult to follow.
I think in all your obfuscation you have you forgotten your own question ;) You may be right and the HI could prove it is fake by some means but it is another subject unrelated to your reposting of the desmog CYA. And now you move on to how the HI can once and for all prove the document is fake by proving they, er, sent it. Or are you helping us out with your lack of Clinton-esque convolution by well, er, showing how they can prove they didn't write it?
Do make sense please you are funny :)
@Mique
"Essentially I was just trying to emphasise that in accepting funding from outside the "politically correct" sources, sceptical scientists (and Prof Carter is surely a scientist even by the rarefied standards of the warmists) leave themselves exposed to the sorts of hypocritical ad hominem attacks so beloved of the CAGW faithful"
That strikes me as rather implausible... as I've pointed out before, there is nothing Heartland does in terms of funding that would be considered a conflict of interest according to IPCC policies. To sustain your position you would have to argue that sceptical scientists must be 'supra-ethical' when compared to climate scientists who routinely receive funding from activist groups such WWF, other types of NGO's, etc. Or, you are implying that the IPCC climate science community is unethical or corrupt, and therefore sceptical scientists must not do what they do. Neither interpretation of your position sounds plausible to me. Perhaps you are making some other point that I have missed?
for the sake of clarity in my last post For "eluding" please read "alluding"
Russell
you say
"They could falsify the hypothesis that they are not telling the truth about the document in question by releasing the original e-mail containing the document itself."
Do you mean the an HI email containing the original of the forged document?
They won't have the original of the forged document only the forger has that, he/she isn't going to release that anytime soon.
If that's not what you mean could you clarify which document you're talking about?
Thanks
Sandy
If anyone have a legitimate, pertinent question to ask Prof. Carter, he or she should simply send him the question by e-mail: it’s easy to find (from his university website) and, from my experience, he responds fairly quickly to polite enquiries.
+1 for Suckergate
A rejected draft of the fake memo: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22815239/RejectedDraftHIMemo.pdf
Justice4Rink
I agree with you completely. Same stupid puerile intent.
Latimer Alder
I agree. Wished I had thought of it.
Sounds like this one backfired big time. Just like that stupid 10:10 video with the red button.
Ian Woolley
You would think that these idiots would go out and buy some new computer equipment. This one is a straight scan (no OCR at all) with what appears to be a Pleistocene scanner. They can get a really good one for about $100, or less. Total crap.
"Thus while Heartland has expressly denied the authenticity of the Strategy document, it does nevertheless seem to be essentially in line with the strategy as actually put forth in their undisputed budget and fundraising documents."
You mean to say that whoever create the fake tied it in to a real document to make it look real?
Whoda thunk it.
Curiously, the XMP toolkit used to generate the fake pdf was:
The XMP toolkit used to create one of the elements of desmog-fracking-the-future.pdf was:
I am not drawing any conclusions about this, just pointing out the coincidence.
Now that I KNOW that the questionable memo IS a FAKE....onto the obvious.
These Warmers forget that the whole Skeptic communitiy has been built on showing the bastardization of information to promote the Warmer's view. Skeptics have gone to great lengths to get to the truth. Truth. Truth.
Yes Truth. Truth hurts. Truth shines.
Skeptics will find the truth like we always do. We have learned every possible way the Warmers can use to fake documents, data, and those laughable models. So now we can see an obvious lame attempt at a smear and it should be almost embarrasing for the Warmers. This was too easy. I had it pegged at the first sentence. The fact that the titles for each topic sometimes have a "." at the end and sometimes they don't.....I mean amature is too high of a compliment for this "document".
So Warmers now will say " fake but accurate"...but they are playing with fire ( wow major pun not intended). Let's see how far they will go to defend this. As the constant drip, drip, drip of when the documents were scanned...their origin....when they were edited or saved...and where they were created...when it all comes out I know FOR SURE that I will be on firmer footing.
Terry,
Lookes like Desmog just got Rathered. Makes me wonder if the "smoking gun" FAKE memo was actually given to Desmog...he scanned it and created the PDF............or maybe he created it.........who knows.
Ian Woolley
Could you please tell me (us?) what that rejected memo was supposed to be. A joke? Someone poking fun at the faker? Or an early version of the memo, or at least the idea of one?
If so, how could you/anyone have come across it?
Sorry, but I am missing what it's supposed to mean ..
As it happens, as Marx was buried in HIghGATE, may I propose HIGATE - where a few other lefties are bound to be buried?
BTW: I was trying to work out what it was about 'The BBC speaking truth unto nations' when it hit me: There's no 'f' in truth at the BBC.
This all goes back to the Warmer Tribe's inability to produce conclusive evidence of something/anything. It's an ongoing problem for them. They produce a lot of stuff, but whatever it is usually doesn't survive casual scrutiny.
Andrew
Just posted by Warren Meyers: Heartland Documents: Whose Biases are Being Revealed Here?
Can't believe the alarmists haven't retracted their articles based on forged memo.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenmeyer/2012/02/16/heartland-documents-whose-biases-are-being-revealed-here/
BH readers of a techie persuasion may enjoy getting up to speed on the 2004 Rathergate forgeries (defended as real by the left for months, but eventually defended only as "fake but accurate"). Joseph Newcomer wasn't the first to report that the forgery had taken place (that was an Atlanta attorney writing as 'Buckhead' on Free Republic) but he did write the most detailed technical analysis that I know of on the topic.
@ HaroldW
Thanks for the info, Harold. Hard to know what Revkin actually said or didn't say.
Regardless, Revkin does in general try to be balanced and has taken a lot of heat for it from the alarmist types. Revkin's treatment so far of Heartland and Idso is certainly more fair than the treatment here of Revkin, IMO.
Stupid fakers...
Jonas N
It was supposed to be satirical (of the faker). I agree, not hugely funny.
More on PatheticGate
I was thinking. If you read the 'strategy document' carefully, it strikes you that Joe Bast, clearly, could not have written this. When I was reading some of the Climategate emails, I had the same feeling.
Unfortunately, the scientists had written those emails.
Has anybody noticed Desmogblog has not posted anything new since yesterday?
Will Nitschke
"That strikes me as rather implausible... as I've pointed out before, there is nothing Heartland does in terms of funding that would be considered a conflict of interest according to IPCC policies. To sustain your position you would have to argue that sceptical scientists must be 'supra-ethical' when compared to climate scientists who routinely receive funding from activist groups such WWF, other types of NGO's, etc. Or, you are implying that the IPCC climate science community is unethical or corrupt, and therefore sceptical scientists must not do what they do. Neither interpretation of your position sounds plausible to me. Perhaps you are making some other point that I have missed?"
That is pretty much exactly what I am saying, Will, ie that sceptical scientists must be "super-ethical" when compared to climate scientists. And, on all the evidence I've seen to date, and I've been watching this debate fairly closely for years now, the second of your alternatives above is about as close to real truth of the situation as we are likely to get, always granting that there are likely to be exceptions on both sides of the argument. By this, I mean that there are likely to be some people with dodgy ethics on the sceptical side as well as some honourable, squeaky clean people on the other.
But within the so-called Hockey Team and the upper echelons of the IPCC, and even anywhere where climate scientists are in competition for government and "green" funding based on global warming research, I suggest that corrupt behaviour as it would normally be defined in, say, government or business circles is more likely to be the norm rather than the exception. Whereas, on the other hand, I would suggest that on the sceptical side, professional ethical behaviour (as normally understood in the wider community, is more likely to be the norm than the exception.
At the same time, with the majority of the world's media only too anxious to encourage politically biassed journalists to try to destroy the credibility of sceptical scientists wherever they can, it doesn't matter one whit whether funding received by Singer, Idso, Watson, or Watts or Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all is sourced from the Virgin Mary's own hand from Jesus Christ's personal trust account for entirely immaculate conceptions, recipients will be attacked viciously for taking the money.
Sad, but inevitable. This is why, back in the day, nuns always travelled in pairs outside the bounds of the convent. Ceasar's wife must me above reproach in reality, and not just perceived as such.
Hey, Mique.
Thank your for the considerate reply earlier (Feb 16, 2012 at 7:38 AM).
I wrote somewhat longer reply that's more critical of Bob Carter but I'm glad I decided to sleep on it. It was neither the time nor the thread. I have words of praise for Prof Carter as well but my criticism will probably bite more than my praise can heal.
As for my comments about Gina Reinhart in a previous thread, I am pretty sure I did not take the issue with her on the basis of a possible Fairfax buyout. From my perspective, mainstream media will always serve the interest of the wealthy classes regardless of who owns them.
So although I don't have a particular objection against Reinhart's ambitions for media ownership, I am very worried how she'll turn out once she succeeds. Murdoch and Packer are/were the devils we knew. Gina Reinhart is the devil we don't know.
My unflattering remarks about her was mostly about her campaign to knock down Mining Resource Super Profits Tax or whatever it was called. Never mind that her wealth increased from 1.8 billion dollars in 2006 to an expected 18 billion dollars this year, she had to cry out doom and gloom to prevent a tax that was meant to share the wealth from mining boom with the rest of Australian people and economy. I blame Gina Reinhart and her fellow mining magnates as much as I blame the loony left for the passage of the Carbon Tax.
In any case, the worst of my comments have now been replaced by the ghost of Mary Whitehouse and, for what it is worth, I was very pleased to learn that Gina has signed up Ian Plimer as an employee, friend and ally.