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Heartland Institute Document Leaker Comes Forward, Maintains Documents Are Real
The Bad Astronomer writes "Last week, an anonymous source leaked several internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a non-profit think tank known for anti-global-warming rhetoric. The leaker has come forward: Peter Gleick, scientist and journalist. In his admission, he cites his own breach of ethics, but also maintains that all the documents are real. This includes the potentially embarrassing '2012 Climate Strategy' document stating that Heartland wants to 'dissuade teachers from teaching science.' Heartland still claims this document is a forgery, but there is no solid evidence either way."
Who has MORE reason to lie about this?
Oh yeah, these are the guys that told you cigarettes were healthy, and that there was no reliable evidence that they harmed people. The world is full of shills and whores who will lie to your face if the price is right. Why should this be a surprise. These guys have a track record. The only thing controversial here is that these reprobates are telling a significant amount of the population exactly what they want to hear. I know its hard, double rough for some, when the lies they tell sound so sweet (consistent with your belief systems...), get over it. These people are not your friends and if China should hire them tomorrow, they'll give you 20 good reasons why eating lead is great for you.
Wake up, that smell is your ass on fire, and these clowns are holding the matches.
Have to applaud the whistleblower for having the courage to do this. Heartland is clearly a tool, not just for deniers, but for industry which would profit from a (further) dumbed-down populace. Where is the outrage, probably due to the present level of dumbing-down, there isn't very much. Bread and circuses.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Here is one article written about it (by someone who believes in AGW)
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/leaked-docs-from-heartland-institute-cause-a-stir-but-is-one-a-fake/253165/
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He should be fired, and possibly prosecuted if any crimes were committed.
Yeah. Put him in jail with this Assange guy! What do I say. Burn'em!!!
This was a really stupid thing for Dr. Gleick to do because it diminishes his cause substantially. For example, he was the lead author of the recent Science paper that everyone was making a big stink about having so many National Academy members on. I'm no (anthropogenic or not)-climate change denier, but this is bad. On a similar note, he also wrote this Forbes piece that mysteriously did not mention he was the lead author of the Science paper.
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
Some pretty interesting and pretty detailed analysis of the memo here.
I'm inclined to say the memo is probably fake given all the weirdness surrounding it, and given who the "leaker" is.
At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute's climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute's apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.
It appears the rest are documents that he knows are official that he acquired deceptively in order to verify the anonymous document. My own personal hunch, as I first noted when this broke, is that '2012 Climate Strategy' is a cheap fake thrown in with real documents. There is probably no way to verify this one way or the other but I don't think this summary or Phil Plait's blog posting adequately explain what Gleick did exactly. Here is one thing that is going for the validity of '2012 Climate Strategy' and that is if Gleick did not alter it then some of the sums and investments roughly match up with the budget document -- which caused Gleick to believe it is completely authentic. However, fiscal knowledge of the Heartland Institute might be more public than people think ...
My work here is dung.
Next news story will involve a suspicious deadly accident involving the leaker.
More likely - the Right will claim Peter Gleick is a party to Obama's Socialist Plot (whatever that is.)
Isn't that enough? You know that's it's OBAAAAMAAAAAAAAA (insert waving "spooky hands" gestures here)! Oooooooooo! And it's SOCIALIIIIIIIIST! And a PLOOOOOOOOOT! Scaaaaaaary!
So in conclusion, that's why we need more military funding. What are you, some kinda KENYAN COMMIE?!? HUH? HUH?
You blew your credibility the millisecond you quoted WUWT as a reliable source. Anthony Watt is just another right wing corporate whore with no credentials, no scientific training, no mainstream credibility, and a big mouth (very common in the wingnut alternative reality).
Why should he be fired if as you say possibly no crimes were committed, and what did he do that was unethical?
The primary problem seems to be:
"In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else's name."
If he was a tech journalist reporting some babble about apple or samsung or the mighty GOOG or whoever, he'd have run the story without even bothering to verify and that would be considered "just show business as usual".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I hope Heartland go completely apeshit and try and sue him. Then they'll get destroyed in discovery.
Oh for.... TGS itself said "he cites his own breach of ethics". Sounds to me like a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
I think he did the right thing. It would be even more unethical to let the bastards keep lying.
Free Martian Whores!
Oh yeah, these are the guys that told you cigarettes were healthy, and that there was no reliable evidence that they harmed people.
Not really, they worked with Phillip Morris to spread material on the effects of secondhand smoke, which was questionable at the time they did so (they had long since stopped doing this before actual studies confirmed the effects). Every think tank ofcourse helps it's sponsors ...
You need to keep history of something in mind. There's a history to every idea, as hard as that is to see. Until 1954, the official medical opinion on smoking itself was that it was healthy as well (there were suspicions from 1912 onwards). Even today I heard someone claim that smoking pot does not have worse health effects than tobacco smoke (think about it : no filters on the sigarettes -> you're actually inhaling burning leaves directly into your lungs which will never again come out. Healthy ? Of course not)
This is still happening to other products too. E.g. soda is supposedly healthy (esp. soda with "added vitamin C" or some such. It's not healthy at all). And sugar-free soda is worse, again something often denied. Or another popular one, that TL lights are healthy and generally good, especially CFL bulbs. We all know you get headaches from them, they can induce epileptic seizures, and research confirms long-term health effects. But they're "better for the environment". I guess environment doesn't include people.
You appear to have answered your own question. Misrepresenting yourself as a specific person that you are not is generally not considered good journalistic ethics. It's okay not to tell them who you are, or not to tell them you're a reporter.
Depending on state law, it might even be a crime. I doubt that, though, since I can't imagine Gleick is dumb enough to make a confession without at least checking with a lawyer first.
Exactly, the truth needs to be made public. If these assholes are lying, then using false pretenses to get information out of them is perfectly fine. You think investigative reporters go around telling the targets of their investigation honestly who they are and what their profession is? Of course not, they'd never get any damning information if they did.
Anthony Watt is just another right wing corporate whore with no credentials, no scientific training, no mainstream credibility, and a big mouth (very common in the wingnut alternative reality).
It should also be noted that he was implicated in the leaked documents. He has every reason to claim that they are fake.
The fossil fuel industry and many of the issues that the Right in this country are harping on have an interesting pattern.
They take an issue that could be potentially dangerous to their profits and turn it into an emotional issue - in this case Global Warming - and when it becomes an emotional issue, all reason is thrown out the door and rational discourse becomes impossible.
Global Warming was discovered decades ago. The fossil fuel companies started to become threatened by it. So we go from scientists have data about global warming and what we could possibly do about it to scientists have a Liberal Agenda to destroy capitalism and our Way of Life.
I have a neighbor and in-laws who live on a steady diet of Fox News and Talk Radio; such as Hannity, and if Global Warming comes up, they say words like "hoax", "socialist", "cause higher taxes", "destroying America", "predictions based upon inaccurate computer models", etc .... in very angry tones.
They're thinking emotionally. The anti-global warming crowd did a very good in turning this into a personal emotional issue.
They do this with other issues. Turn an issue from a purely academic one into dumbed down emotional rhetoric, and you got the other guys by the balls.
That's where the climate scientists got screwed. The fossil fuel industry got their PR people on it and then the right wing talking heads grabbed onto it, and now we have this mess of an issue that I for one have given up complete hope that anything can be done now.
tl;dr: industry is great at turning a scientific issue into an emotional one - an "us" vs. "them" issue and neutering the opposition.
No experience?
Went to Harvard law school, edited the Harvard Law Review, Lecturer at Columbia, gave up a potentially lucrative career to help poor people as a community organizer. Bestselling author. Elected to the US senate.
Granted he had limited executive experience, but only one of the 8 candidates in that primary had executive experience (Bill Richardson, former governor). All the others were from the senate or house.
See, here's another moron sticking up for this shitty president.
There are people who just hate one side or another. And they predictably come up with the most shockingly shallow bullshit. And when someone points out /anything/ that might question deeply held prejudices, the ideologues call them stupid.
/greatly/ if people like you suddenly moved to pluto, where you could scream at each other all day, and the rest of society could actually get on with addressing the ISSUES.
The truth is not always on one side or the other, and it is not always neatly in between -- and society as a whole would benefit
I say this, already expecting a big woooossshhh before I even hit the Submit button. Part of me thinks you are a charity case.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Facts don't matter in American politics.
The cowardly pundit will say Democrats do it and Republicans do it. This is true but banal. We could also say the Hitler and Lincoln were imperfect human beings.
There is a whole new level of crazy that has gripped Republican politics, and it is really too bad. I would love to have seen John Huntsman do well in the primaries, or even see the Republicans field some accomplished credentials. (e.g.: Colin Powell would be more accomplished then the entire republican field put together.)
Now we have the party of anti-science. We have Karl Rove eschewing the "reality-based community" which looks for solutions through judicious analysis. We have reactionary politics and faith-based righteous indignation. Somewhat ironically, Jesus preached love, not fear. And the christian right are driven by fear of all sorts of things -- mainly irrational.
The republicans really need to remake themselves, but the Tea Party has been a step in the wrong direction. More fear and reactionary politics. It really is too bad.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Heartland claims Earlier this evening, Peter Gleick, a prominent figure in the global warming movement, confessed to stealing electronic documents from The Heartland Institute in an attempt to discredit and embarrass a group that disagrees with his views.
In fact, he made no such confession. What he said is: At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute's climate program strategy.
Then, he went to the effort of attempting to verify the authenticity and accuracy of the documents by pretending to be someone else and asking for information directly from Heartland: The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget.
So, he did pretend to be someone else, but he stole nothing. If the original documents were stolen (which is pure speculation), it was by someone other than Gleick. Impersonating someone else is certainly nothing to be taken lightly, but it's a well established technique used by reporter and investigators when using your real name may impede or alter your access to the information. Whether a crime was committed requires more details than given. But there is no evidence that he stole anything, and as such, he may have a slander or libel claim against Heartland for their statement. IANAL.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Deniers always talk about popper, and science, and how they are the rigorous ones. They want falsifiable hypotheses, and when they get one -- they will argue black is white over whether or not it is falsifiable. They think they know more then the 1000s of /actual/ scientists who study the issue.
It is denial, because it is a black and white issue, they are right, and there is an inability to cognitively represent any disconfirming evidence. They always see themselves as sane, and therefore people who disagree with them are: stupid, evil, or uneducated.
Lord Monckton is at the zenith of climate change denialism. I honestly believe that he doesn't know he is just making stuff up. Vetren anti-science debunker potholer54 puts out a challenge to denialists: come up with ONE thing that Monckton gets right, that calls into question the IPCC's conclusions. To complete the challenge, you actually have to find Monckton's references, and assess that they really support what Monckton say.
And this is the key sticking point. Denialists just believe anything they hear, so long as it confirms their biases. It is obvious that denialists doen't follow references, because of the absurdly high number of mistakes that are made.
There is actually a slew of falsifiable hypotheses in AGW. All of them are very precisely defined and tested. An argument is built from 1000s of studies of more then 100 years of scientific research.
Don't believe me? Crack open an IPCC report and actually read it.
PS: Popper is not without critics in the philosophy of science, but that is another story.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It takes in excess of $100 million to drill a deepwater offshore well these days, and it takes ~10 years after the exploration phase before the production starts (assuming success). Given those costs and a 10:1 success ratio in less-explored areas, an obscene profit margin can disappear pretty quick,
Yeah! Why, with a profit margin of only 38 billion dollars a year, at a hundred million to drill a deepwater offshore well, they'll be losing money if they drill a mere three hundred and eighty deepwater offshore wells every year, and not one actually produces oil.
Oh, wait-- the cost of drilling the well doesn't come out of their profit, it's already incorporated in their expenses. So, that forty billion dollars of profit already accounts for the costs of drilling wells. Never mind.
Solving the problem of climate change is really an economic growth opportunity. Really. Re-read. Don't dismiss. Think. We have a huge R&D investment opportunity, and new high-tech industries and products... and guess what... Europe and Asia may take it all.
Economic growth is utter bullshit. Economists and politicians keep feeding us this rubbish about how much better off we are now than in the past, and how much better it can get. Sure, we have it better than people before the 60s. People in the 60s and 70s had it better than we do now, barring some minor quality of life improvements from better technology. But we have longer working hours, in families where 2 instead of 1 parent works full time. We have a degrading environment. We have inflation and massive public debt that, when you trace it back, is owed to people who rape the economy and pay our politicians to allow them to continue doing so. We have a world full of people who think CYA instead of thinking about getting shit done. Screw economic growth. I'd be much happier in a world without rip-off merchants, where people work for a decent living, and government spending was about the kind of cool shit they did before I was born, like going to the moon. Not wars designed to further line the pockets of already obscenely wealthy people, boosting population wide "economic growth" while having no effect on 99% of us barring a few extra coffins being shipped home.