Megan McArdle is still riffing on the Heartland documents and has come up with some interesting new bits and pieces. For a start it appears that the Koch Foundation were not actually funding Heartland's climate change activities but their work on healthcare. I don't suppose we will be reading about this on the pages of the Guardian.
She also has a useful summary of the evidence about who the faker might be.
For me, this leaves the most fascinating question of all: who wrote it? We have a few clues:
1) They are on the west coast
2) They own or have access to an Epson scanner--though God knows, this could be at a Kinkos.
3) They probably themselves have a somewhat run-on writing style
4) I'm guessing they use the word "high-profile" a fair amount.
5) They are bizarrely obsessed with global warming coverage at Forbes, which suggests to me that there is a good chance that they write or comment on the website, or that they have tangled with writers at Forbes (probably Taylor) either in public or private.
6) The last paragraph is the biggest departure from the source documents, and is therefore likely to be closest to the author's own style.
7) I have a strong suspicion that they refrained from commenting on the document dump. That's what I'd do, anyway. A commenter or email correspondent who suddenly disappeared when they normally would have been reveling in this sort of story is a good candidate.
8) They seem to have it in for Andy Revkin at the New York Times. There's nothing in the other documents to indicate that Heartland thinks Revkin is amenable to being . . . turned? I'm not sure what the right word is, but the implication in the strategy memo that Heartland believes it could somehow develop a relationship with Revkin seems aimed at discrediting Revkin's work.
Unfortunately, I'd imagine that this is still a sizeable set of people, and it will be hard to identify the author. I suspect that it will be easier to do if the climate-bloggers--who may well know this person as a commenter or correspondent--get involved in trying to find out who muddied the story by perpetrating a fraud on their sites.
I had to smile at the last bit. I wonder whether we climate bloggers can think of anyone who might fit the bill?