From Climategate to Denialgate

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

karma_

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Documents he already had. I doubt very much will come of this, and I also doubt HI will sue, their credibility is already shredded.

Would you like to see Gleick prosecuted? Even though all he did was to tell the truth. Furthermore, please entertain us with your thoughts, now that we can assume that all the released documents were legitimate? Perhaps falling on his sword was the only way for Gleick to refute the allegation it was false.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Moriarty

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Can you show me anyone that's been successfully prosecuted for wire fraud for receiving (edit: non financial-related, or later benefited financially from) documents by claiming they were an employee?

I'm genuinely interested, I've never heard of wire fraud legislation being successfully used in this manner.

karma_

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

They have been very aggressive on the PR campaign, and indeed they have threatened legal action, of course that's a long way short of actually proceeding. Time will tell on that one.

I have no personal desire to see Gleick prosecuted — as far as I'm concerned, the damage he has done to his reputation, his career, and his profession should be regarded as damage enough — but it's not up to me. Under U.S. law, there appears to be a very strong case to be made that he committed wire fraud, which is a federal criminal offense.

And you'd likely have said the same of Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, his reputation did not suffer, in fact quite the opposite.

Would you say that all the News of the World did was tell the truth? Even if the truth was obtained by illegal means?

If that truth was in the public interest, of course, in fact, I expect it.

Some of the documents appear to be legitimate, others may have been maliciously altered, and at least one is an outright forgery. Nowhere have I said that all the documents are legitimate.

The evidence we now have is that all documents Gleick had were confirmed when the HI emailed him the corroborating package. It's also plain to see even in this thread, that that particular line of the defence cooled considerably since the Gleick revelation. Coincidence? Surely not.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

karma_

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

You're twisting my reply to suit yourself now, unbelievably you're trying to rope in the NOTW phone hacking scandal.

I've answered your question clearly, which is more than you have afforded anyone else in the thread.

Scofflaw

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Permabear wrote:

This post had been deleted.

I don't recall you - or anyone on the climate opposition - ever condemning the theft of emails from CRU, despite the fact that it was genuinely a criminal act. This has not been determined to be a criminal act at all, yet you're denouncing it furiously. "Wire fraud" is a huge stretch considering that the Heartland Institute lost nothing by the act - a copy sent by email costs nothing, the documents are valueless in themselves.

On the flip side of that equation, the "public interest value" of the documents is very large - this is a public debate about a policy issue that will set the framework for many other policies for years (which is of course why there's money in polluting the debate with misinformation), and HI's documents show the internal workings of an important player.

So the 'public interest value' of the documents is huge, and were there nothing discreditable to Heartland in them, I'm sure Heartland would be amongst the first to claim that outweighs other considerations.

Alas for Heartland, though, the documents are highly discreditable. All the ballyhooing about Gleick is, of course, an attempt to distract from exactly that point, which is why it's occasionally worth cutting through your personal repetition of the HI PR line to remind ourselves that they show corporations paying money to a PR outfit to do for them what the same outfit did for the tobacco giants - spread deliberately manufactured disinformation through apparently "neutral experts" into a vitally important public debate in order to undermine the best available scientific conclusions to protect profits.

We'll keep coming back to that long after HI have had to back off from the pretense that anything criminal has happened to them.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Scofflaw

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

I did say that I don't recall it - feel free to point to your condemnation at the time.

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Not particularly - one started a police investigation because it involved hacking and theft, the other is a "criminal act" only if we're prepared to accept that someone might perhaps be able to stretch an almost irrelevant piece of legislation to cover it.

Both are discreditable, but I think the principle that criminal acts are more discreditable than non-criminal acts is fairly firmly established.

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

It would be inconsistent for me to support Wikileaks, which I do, or whistleblowing in general, which I also do, and not to take such a stance here.

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Good Lord, but why on earth would it damage donor relations? Surely everything is above board and absolutely creditable in giving to such a fine "think tank" - you've said so yourself. If they've nothing to hide, they've obviously nothing to fear.

Even arguing that the secretary was unduly careless is a bit hard considering that donations to tax-exempt organisations such as Heartland are a matter of record. So it can hardly be argued that the donors wish to hide the mere fact of their donations...which leaves us with the undeniable problem that HI have been shown to be spending that money on disinformation campaigns. I can imagine the donors might be upset about that alright - but somehow I can't see Heartland arguing that in court.

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Dear me, the irony! After all, according to Heartland, that's exactly what it does. Indeed, it's their whole raison d'etre and business model - and you're defending them.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

karma_

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

How often do you have to be challenged to discuss the actual implications of the documents? Why do you keep driving the discussion away from that? Even in your response here, you cherry-picked the parts of the post you felt like answering and conveniently forgot about the parts you were uncomfortable with!

You have spent this entire thread deflecting, you will literally talk about anything except the actual content of the revelations.

Why?

Moriarty

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Simple question: do you support organisations and individuals who misrepresent themselves to influence others for their own goals? Would you support a judge who misrepresents themselves as being impartial when they're secretly on the payroll of a company you are about to bring to court and have this judge preside over the case?

Scofflaw

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

It is, of course - but the discrepancy in condemnation is equally obvious.

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

It is, after all, what whistleblowers do - reveal documents that people would rather not have revealed. I do somewhat doubt you were under the impression such documents were ordinarily obtained under circumstances of complete frankness. And that is what has been done here - not very creditable for Gleick, as he admits himself, and deeply embarrassing for someone on an ethics committee.

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Yet since Heartland is such a fine upstanding institution, and their work so patently proof against criticism, as you have said, it remains extraordinarily hard to see why these donors should be in any way unwilling to be connected publicly with a body they're willing to contribute to privately.

On the other hand, I can certainly see why Federal employees being paid by Heartland might be an issue:

Representative Raúl M. Grijalva today called for a full Natural Resources Committee hearing to probe whether Indur Goklany, a Senior Advisor at the U.S. Interior Department, improperly received payments from the Heartland Institute while collecting a paycheck from U.S. taxpayers.

Rep. Grijalva, the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands, urged his fellow Congressmen to hold a hearing as early as next week to determine whether Goklany “received money he was promised by the Heartland Institute for writing a chapter in a book focused on climate policy in apparent violation of federal rules, among other issues.”

It's a gift that keeps giving, really.

cordially,
Scofflaw

K-9

Scofflaw wrote: »

It's a gift that keeps giving, really.

cordially,
Scofflaw

And with the likes of Santorum's position on climate change, I'd say likely to give more.

I wonder who the donor is who gave Millions upon Millions to the institute and how it was financed?

Scofflaw

K-9 wrote: »

And with the likes of Santorum's position on climate change, I'd say likely to give more.

I wonder who the donor is who gave Millions upon Millions to the institute and how it was financed?

Some interesting speculation on the Daily Kos, but I admit it's not of great interest to me - there will always be someone who needs the sort of services Heartland can provide for their bottom line, and rich people with strong political views are hardly a new phenomenon.

What interests me is seeing the way Heartland protects its clients' interests, and the defence of such antics by otherwise quite reasonable people, unpaid. It reminds one that in defence of ideology, the end is taken to justify the means, because the means are clearly unjustifiable by themselves - none of HI's defenders here have really attempted to justify them, for example - yet the institution that does those things for a living, and did so for years for the tobacco industry before climate change denial became a paying proposition, is being defended by those same people.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Moriarty

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

At the risk of coming across as impertinent, I refer you to the previous sentance:

Moriarty wrote: »

Simple question: do you support organisations and individuals who misrepresent themselves to influence others for their own goals?

Scofflaw

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Unsurprising I'll grant you - but immensely discreditable too. There's a world of difference between hearing that people use such tactics, and seeing them written out in board minutes and budgets.

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

The one overtly and publicly accepted as a criminal act, the other one something that would take a very good lawyer a lot of work to thinly stretch entirely different legislation over.

I'd be interested to know whether this condemnation of yours stretches to all whistleblowing, since whistleblowing almost always involves some act of deception or sneakiness where it's not outright illegal.

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

I have no difficulty at all in saying that donations to any campaigning organisation should self-evidently be public knowledge. How on earth is one supposed to be sure of the honesty of a campaign unless one is sure that it's not simply to benefit someone's bottom line?

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

In respect of political donations...well, yes I do. You'd apparently be surprised how common a view that is.

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

As are you. But then neither of us are, I hope, being funded to promote someone else's agenda on a purely commercial basis. We do try to discourage such users, because they tend to inject a lot of dishonesty into the forum's discussions. Hopefully you can see how that principle applies to Heartland.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Scofflaw

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

I imagine the issue will come up wherever climate change gets debated. It's not just Heartland that has been tarnished here - and in some senses, not Heartland at all.

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

I'm sure he'll do his best. Anyone can litigate, though.

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

It's not uncommon for whistleblowers to act because for one reason or another they are in possession of internal documents to which they would not normally have access, while the mere act of releasing internal documents is not usually viewed as honest by those whose documents have been released. They too often seek to press civil and criminal charges.

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

I'm obviously not concerned with small personal donations, because they're individually too small for the donor to wield influence over the recipient.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Scofflaw

And the lawyers respond to Heartland's attempts to have everyone shut up:

Dear Ms. Martin:

I am General Counsel of the Center for American Progress Action Fund (“CAP Action”). This letter responds to your February 19 message regarding our reporters’ coverage of documents related to the Heartland Institute. Please be assured that CAP Action takes the accuracy of its reporting seriously.

Your letter asserts that the document entitled “2012 Heartland Climate Strategy” is “fabricated and false.” CAP Action has no interest in attributing a fabricated document to Heartland. Given the seriousness of this charge, and the fact that this document’s “tone and content closely matched that of other documents that [Heartland] did not dispute,”1 we ask your assistance in verifying that the document is in fact “fabricated” rather than, for example, a draft of which you were not immediately aware. Please let me know the efforts that Heartland undertook to ensure that the document “was not written by anyone associated with Heartland,” as well as the “obvious and gross misstatements of fact” it contains. We have removed this document from the website while awaiting your response.

Your letter also notes that “Heartland has not authenticated” the remaining documents in the week since they were made public. To my knowledge, Heartland has never claimed that these documents were fabricated, and your February 15 admission that they were sent by a Heartland staff person to “an unknown person” posing as a Heartland board member suggests they are genuine. So does Heartland’s February 15 apology to the donors identified in the documents. Subsequently, the newly-admitted source has indicated that he received these documents directly from Heartland and has not altered them. Nevertheless, we await the outcome of your continued efforts to “authenticate” these documents.

Finally, your letter suggests that publication or even discussion of the Heartland documents “is improper and unlawful” because Heartland deems them “confidential.” The Supreme Court has flatly rejected this notion, repeatedly declaring that the First Amendment protects the right to publish information obtained lawfully – even if underlying sources act improperly, erroneously, or in violation of the law. See, e.g., Bartnicki v. Vopper, 532 U.S. 514, 535 (2001). As CAP Action has reported, our bloggers received the documents via an anonymous email. Our reporters did nothing to purloin any documents, they did not encourage anyone else to do so, and they did not know the sender’s identity until many days later, on February 20, when the Huffington Post article titled: “The Origin of the Heartland Documents” was published. Faced with a substantially similar set of relevant facts in Bartnicki, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment prohibited recovery of damages for dissemination of an illegally-made recording that was left in a defendant’s mailbox because “a stranger’s illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern.” Id.; see also Jean v. Massachusetts State Police, 492 F.3d 24, 29 (1st Cir. 2007) (applying Bartnicki). The same is true here, although we note that CAP Action takes no position as to whether the documents were lawfully obtained by the source.

CAP Action has taken extraordinary steps to ensure that Heartland’s perspective on these documents is included in our coverage. As your letter notes, CAP Action immediately and conspicuously linked to Heartland’s February 15 press release regarding the documents and has subsequently noted Heartland’s assertions in other blog posts in order to ensure that your position on these documents was reported fully and fairly. If you would like to provide us with additional information, including answers to the questions above, we will certainly consider it.

This is not a full recitation of the relevant facts and CAP Action reserves all its rights, remedies and defenses concerning these issues.

Sincerely,

Debbie Fine

General Counsel

Doesn't deal with Gleick's position, but hopefully we can at least dispense with the farcical HI claim that those who have in turn used the documents and blogged or written about them were guilty of some misconduct.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Scofflaw

Desmogblog has decided that the Climate Agenda document is likely not faked:

A line-by-line evaluation of the Climate Strategy memo, which the Heartland Institute has repeatedly denounced as a "fake" shows no “obvious and gross misstatements of fact,” as Heartland has alleged. On the contrary, the Climate Strategy document is corroborated by Heartland’s own material and/or by its allies and employees.

It also uses phrases, language and, in many cases, whole sentences that were taken directly from Heartland’s own material. Only someone who had previous access to all of that material could have prepared the Climate Strategy in its current form.

In all the circumstances – taking into account Peter Gleick’s explanation of the origin of the Heartland documents, and in direct contradiction of Heartland’s stated position – DeSmogBlog has concluded that the Climate Strategy memo is authentic.

Assuming Gleick is telling the truth about how he acquired the first document - and given he has admitted to obtaining the other documents by pretending to be someone else to the great detriment of his reputation, I can't see why he'd not say that he'd obtained the other the same way.

There's elements, of course, of "well, they would say that", but the point about the correspondence in language and material indicating that whoever wrote the Climate Agenda already had access to Heartland documents seems reasonable.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Scofflaw

And Nature takes a critical stance on Gleick's actions:

Dishonesty, however tempting, is the wrong way to tackle climate sceptics.

In a much-quoted Editorial in March 2010 (Nature 464, 141; 2010), this publication urged researchers to acknowledge that they are involved in a street fight over the communication of climate science. So would it now be hypocritical to condemn Peter Gleick for fighting dirty? Gleick, a hydroclimatologist and president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Oakland, California, admitted in a statement on news website The Huffington Post on 20 February that he had duped the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank based in Chicago, Illinois, into handing over documents that detailed its financial support for climate sceptics. Gleick had passed these documents on to the website DeSmogBlog.com, which made them public on 14 February.

Gleick's deception — using an e-mail address set up in someone else's name to request the documents from Heartland — is certainly in line with some of the tactics used to undermine climate science. When in November 2009 a hacker distributed thousands of e-mails stolen from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, Heartland was prominent among those who criticized not the hacker, but the scientists who wrote the messages. However, Gleick, as he has admitted, crossed an important line when he acted in such a duplicitous way. It was a foolish action for a scientist, especially one who regularly engages with the public and critics. Society rightly looks to scientists for fairness and impartiality. Dishonesty, whatever its form and motivation, is a stain on the individual and the profession. Gleick does deserve credit for coming clean — but, it must be said, he did so only after he was publicly accused on the Internet of being involved.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v482/n7386/full/482440b.html

cordially,
Scofflaw

karma_

Permabear, your stance and defence here of your brand of ideology reminded me of the stance creationists take in pushing their nonsense. Again, my curiosity was piqued and I had to satiate it. Once again I was not to be disappointed:

I found the following to be relevant to the current discussion - in response to this:

Scientific literacy is essential for everyone in a democratic society as science impacts politics everyday and citizens are required to make decisions which impact policy towards science.

You had this to say:

Permabear -
Absolutely. If more people were scientifically literate, then fewer politicians would get away with advocating positions that are essentially based on "junk science."

Supplant 'politicians' with 'anti-global warming think tanks' and you should see what I'm driving at.

Valmont

karma_ wrote: »

Permabear, your stance and defence here of your brand of ideology reminded me of the stance creationists take in pushing their nonsense.

Would you also rank Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT as an ideologue pushing nonsense?

What about Freeman Dyson, winner of the Fermi award, Templeton prize, and Wolf prize? Is he simply a nonsense-pushing ideologue for not parrotting the AGW party line?

Some very prominent and respected scientists have their doubts about the AGW narrative specifically because of attitudes like yours. They want debate, discussion, and for the black-listing to stop. These are highly intelligent and respected scientists and trying to cast them off as nonsensical ideologues is simply fanatical environmentalism at its worst. I hope you can see the irony in your attempts to stamp out perceived dissent with ad-hominem attacks and resorts to the majority position.

Freeman Dyson wrote:

"[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have."

Scofflaw

Valmont wrote: »

Would you also rank Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT as an ideologue pushing nonsense?

What about Freeman Dyson, winner of the Fermi award, Templeton prize, and Wolf prize? Is he simply a nonsense-pushing ideologue for not parrotting the AGW party line?

Some very prominent and respected scientists have their doubts about the AGW narrative specifically because of attitudes like yours. They want debate, discussion, and for the black-listing to stop. These are highly intelligent and respected scientists and trying to cast them off as nonsensical ideologues is simply fanatical environmentalism at its worst. I hope you can see the irony in your attempts to stamp out perceived dissent with ad-hominem attacks and resorts to the majority position.

And the attempts by skeptical commentators all over the web and mainstream media to stifle this particular item of news and brand everyone who has so much as commented on it as criminals is, of course, not in any sense whatsoever even slightly similar.

In the light of Heartland's actions, your heartfelt plea that some people just want "debate, discussion, and for the black-listing to stop" rings even more hollow than Permabear's citing of "the ends don't justify the means". The whole point of the HI documents is that they're about poisoning the debate through PR, and over the next while we shall be treated to continued desperate attempts to both stifle any attempts at debate or discussion, and to have anyone associated blacklisted or destroyed.

cordially,
Scofflaw