Whodunnit?
Feb 17, 2012
Bishop Hill in Climate: fakegate, Climate: other

Megan McArdle at the Atlantic has done an excellent analysis of the Heartland documents and comes to the conclusion that the strategy document was indeed a fake.

Overall, like the fake documents and quotes of earlier posts, [the strategy document] just feels too convenient.  It's a super-handy roadmap to all the most incendiary portions of the other documents, and it contains absolutely nothing that does not serve that purpose--no formulaic self-puffery, no mentions of problems that you would think a legitimate memo would have covered, like the precipitous cuts in their global warming programs that they were forced to undertake when their anonymous donor delivered less cash than expected in 2011.  It reads like it was written for climate activists.  And I don't get the feeling that the folks at Heartland are much interested in helping out their friends at ClimateProgress and Grist.

There's also some very interesting speculation about the identify of the culprit going on in the comments at Lucia's at the moment. Steven Mosher has noted the west-coast time stamp in the strategy document metadata and also some of the stylistic quirks of the author - poor punctuation, excessive use of parenthesis, and also the use of the strange term "anti-climate". Comparisons are being made with the literary style and twitterings of none other than Peter Gleick, the very green head of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California.

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