The New Climate Scandal

A new scandal has broken and is still wending it's way through the press and blogs.  It seems a number of papers and a memo were released from the Heartland Institute to climate alarmist bloggers by an alleged "inside source" which which were to be purported to show that the Institute, long known for it's opposition to the idea of catastrophic global warming and the proposed decarbonization of western civilization was planning an education campaign to convince the public of this, including *gasp* education of students.

Heartland essentially admitted that all the papers except one, the summary memo, were in fact real, and had been released by email to someone falsely claiming to be a member of the board of directors.  The memo in question was unique in the way that it appeared to presume bad motives on the part of Heartland, according to Megan McArdle of the Atlantic. It was as if someone took the facts in the papers and twisted them in such a way as to make Heartland seem guilty of bad motives in it's program.

“Basically, it reads like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.”

Everybody thinks they're the good guy, so this was kind of a tip off.

Bloggers began to examine the documents and found several additional anomalies.  All the documents except "the memo" were high quality PDF created by Adobe, but the memo was scanned on an Epson scanner.  The dates on all the papers matched except the memo, which was created one day before the papers were released to the public.  The time zone of creation of all the documents matched the time zone of Heartland, except the memo, which was created in the Pacific timezone.

On Monday night, a prominent Climate Warmist, Peter Gleick, of the Pacific Institute, confessed to having impersonated the Heartland Board member, after having been anonymously been given "the memo", and releasing those papers anonymously to bloggers to spread.  He claims (so far) not to know the provenance of the memo.  Maybe he got it from Luci Ramirez.  In his admission, he managed to blame the victim:

My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts -- often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated -- to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.

Of course, as we saw last night with the well funded, coordinated and secretive attack on fracking, from from the Rockerfeller Foundation, both sides play this game..

It turns out that California actually has laws against  impersonating someone to obtain private documents, and Heartland has expressed interest in pursuing it's claim against Gleick and the bloggers who first posted the documents in question.

Gleick has resigned his position with the American Geophysical Union, where he served the Chair of the Task Force on Scientific Ethics, as well as the National Center for Science Education.  Dr. Judith Curry, a true climate scientist, and as near as I can tell a "weak warmist" notes the disparity between his actions and his ethics here:

Gleick’s ‘integrity’ seems to have nothing to do with scientific integrity, but rather loyalty to and consistency with what I have called the UNFCCC/IPCC ideology. From my previous post No Ideologues:

Now there is nothing prima facie wrong with ideology. Wikipedia has this to say on ideology:

An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one’s goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things . . . The main purpose behind an ideology is to offer change in society . . . Ideologies are systems of abstract thought applied to public matters and thus make this concept central to politics.

There does seem to be an IPCC/UNFCCC ideology, let me try to lay it out here.

1. Anthropogenic climate change is real.
2. Anthropogenic climate change is dangerous and we need to something about it.
3. The fossil fuel industry is trying to convince people that climate change is a hoax.
4. Deniers are attacking climate science and scientists.
5. Action is needed to prevent dangerous climate change.
6. Deniers and fossil fuel industry are delaying UNFCCC mitigatory policies.

This one has been fast and fun, but it looks like the action is slowing down now.  For continuing updates, I would suggest checking Watts Up With That, which has been keeping a continuous ongoing record of events.