The Heartland Institute plans to pay Indur Goklany, an expert on climate economics and policy, a monthly stipend to write a chapter on those topics for the Institute’s forthcoming mega-report, Climate Change Reconsidered 2012. Earlier this week, Greenpeace and Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) called for a congressional investigation of Goklany. In addition to being an independent scholar, Goklany is a Department of Interior employee. Federal employees may not receive outside income for teaching, writing, or speaking related to their “official duties.”

But as I pointed out yesterday on this site, climate economics and policy are (to the best of my knowledge) not part of Goklany’s “official duties.” It would be shocking if they were. Goklany is a leading debunker of climate alarm and opposes coercive decarbonization schemes. Why on earth would the Obama Interior Department assign someone like that to work on climate policy?

Greenpeace and Grijalva have got the wrong target in their sites. The inquisition they propose might actually have some merit if directed at one of their heroes: Dr. James Hansen of NASA. Hansen has received upwards of $1.6 million in outside income. And it’s not unreasonable to assume that most or all of that income was for teaching, writing, and speaking on matters “related to” his “official duties.”

My colleague Chris Horner laid out the juicy details last November in a column posted on Watts Up With That. In “Dr. James Hansen’s growing financial scandal, now over a million dollars of outside income,” Chris argued that Hansen gets substantial outside income for activities related to his official duties and does not always comply with federal financial disclosure regulations:

NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA.

This does not include six-figure income over that period in travel expenses to fly around the world to receive money from outside interests. As specifically detailed below, Hansen failed to report tens of thousands of dollars in global travel provided to him by outside parties — including to London, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Tokyo, the Austrian Alps, Bilbao, California, Australia and elsewhere, often business or first-class and also often paying for his wife as well — to receive honoraria to speak about the topic of his taxpayer-funded employment, or get cash awards for his activism and even for his past testimony and other work for NASA.

Ethics laws require that such payments or gifts be reported on an SF278 public financial disclosure form. As detailed, below, Hansen nonetheless regularly refused to report this income.

Also, he seems to have inappropriately taken between $10,000 and $26,000 for speeches unlawfully promoting him as a NASA employee.

There’s more in Chris’s post, but you get the drift.

Now, I wondered whether Hansen, an employee of NASA, an independent agency, is subject to the same outside compensation rules as Goklany, an employee of an Executive Agency. The answer is yes. NASA’s guidelines on “outside employment” state that ”Employees should refer generally to the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch, 5 CFR Part 2635,” and must comply with Subpart H.

CFR Part 2365, Subpart H bars an employee from receiving compensation for speaking, teaching, or writing “that relates to the employee’s official duties.” Quite sensibly, though, the employee may receive compensation for speaking, teaching, or writing not related to his official duties:

Note: Section 2635.807(a)(2)(i)(E) does not preclude an employee, other than a covered noncareer employee, from receiving compensation for teaching, speaking or writing on a subject within the employee’s discipline or inherent area of expertise based on his educational background or experience even though the teaching, speaking or writing deals generally with a subject within the agency’s areas of responsibility.

This language seems to fit Goklany to a tee. The proposed chapter for Heartland on climate economics and policy is within Goklany’s discipline and area of expertise but it is not related to his official duties.

Can anyone with a straight face say the same about Hansen? How could Hansen’s teaching, speaking, and writing about climate change not be related to his official duties? How then could the outside income he has received for those activities not be unlawful?

Rep. Grijalva’s demand for a House Resources Committee “hearing” on Goklany is preposterous. A letter of inquiry would suffice even if there were evidence of improper conduct, which there is not.

My unsolicited advice to Committee Chair Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) is to politely reject Grijalva’s request but also to ask Grijalva, just for the record, whether he and Greenpeace think the Committee should investigate James Hansen’s million dollar-plus outside income.

Anthony Watts’s indispensable Web site, Watts Up with That?, has a trove of hard-hitting commentaries on climate scientist Peter Gleick’s theft and publication of the Heartland Institute’s fund-raising documents and apparent forgery of a “confidential” climate strategy memo. Gleick earlier this week confessed to stealing the documents, but not to fabricating the strategy memo, although textual and other evidence point to him as the culprit.

Gleick, who described his conduct as a “serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics,” has resigned from his post as Chair of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Task Force on Scientific Integrity. He nonetheless tried to blame the victim, claiming “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.”

Yep, it’s the small underfunded band of free market think tanks who are stifling the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the National Academy of Sciences and their numerous brethren overseas, the European Environment Agency, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the EPA, NRDC, Greenpeace, etc. etc. Heartland invited Gleick to attend a public event and debate climate change just days before he stole the documents. Gleick turned down the invitation. Yet Gleick has the chutzpah to plead ”frustration” at those trying to “prevent this debate.”

Among the key posts on Anthony’s site to check out: Joe Bast’s Skype interview with the Wall Street Journal; Dr. Willis Eschenbach’s Open Letter to Dr. Linda Gunderson, who succeeds Gleick as Chair of the AGU Scientific Integrity Task Force; and Megan McCardle’s column in The Atlantic reviewing among other things evidence fingering Gleick as the author of the fake strategy memo.

In his Skype interview with the Wall Street Journal, Joe Bast explains the similarity between Climategate and Fakegate:

We call it Fakegate after ‘faked document.’ We think that this event, very similar to Climategate, documented how desperate these scientists are. How they are willing to stoop to very low levels in order to advance their agenda. How they’re not really interested in debate at all, they’re interested in shutting down debate, shutting down institutions like the Heartland Institute that take a different point of view.

Noting that the Climategate scientists stonewalled Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to prevent independent researchers from checking their data and methods, Joe also explains why there is no inconsistency in applauding the release of the Climategate emails and condemning Gleick’s theft of the Heartland documents:

Now it’s been pointed out that maybe we’re hypocritical to complain that documents were stolen from us and yet we quoted from the documents that were taken from the scientists, the Climategate event. I think it’s very different. The Heartland Institute is a private organization, we’re not a public organization, and we’re not subject to FOIA requests. The documents that were taken from us don’t show any scheming, any kind of dishonest transactions, any attempt to suppress debate. Just the opposite, it’s an open plan that we write about all the time, put on our Web site, put it in newsletters, to our donors, all of that information was there. The purpose of stealing our documents was very specific. It was to expose our donors and to create a fraudulent narrative about why we do what we do. That’s very different from the Climategate situation.

For more on this topic, see my post yesterday on GlobalWarming.Org.

Willis Eschenbach’s Open Letter to Dr. Linda Gunderson urges the AGU’s new chair on scientific integrity not to trivialize or make excuses for Gleick’s misconduct lest the candid world conclude that the “rot” of “noble cause corruption” is so deep in the climate science community that it cannot be rooted out. A few pearls:

Next, let me put it to you straight. As Dr. Gleick’s demise for wire fraud is just the latest demonstration, far too many climate scientists have all the scientific integrity of a desperate grifter whose con is going badly wrong. Consider for example the response from Dr. Gleick’s supporters to his actions, who in many cases have lauded him as a “whistleblower”, and some of whom stop just short of proposing him for climate sainthood.

So my question for you is this: what are you planning to do about this abysmal state of affairs?

Make no mistake. If Peter Gleick walks away from this debacle free of expulsion, sanction, or censure from the AGU, without suffering any further penalties, your reputation and the reputation of the AGU will forever join his on the cutting room floor. People are already laughing at the spectacle of the chair of a task force on scientific integrity getting caught with his entire arm in the cookie jar. You have one, and only one, chance to stop the laughter.

Because if your Task Force doesn’t have the bal … the scientific integrity to take up the case of its late and unlamented commander as its very first order of business, my Spidey-sense says that it will be forever known as the “AGU Task Farce on Scientific Integrity”. You have a clear integrity case staring you in the face. If you only respond to Dr. Gleick’s reprehensible actions with vague platitudes about “the importance of …”, if the Task Force’s only contribution is mealy-mouthed mumblings about how “we deplore …” and “we are disappointed …”, I assure you that people will continue to point and laugh at that kind of spineless pretense of scientific integrity.

Folks are fed up with climate scientists who lie, cheat, and steal to attack their scientific opponents, and who then walk away without the slightest action being taken by other scientists. As long as there are no repercussions from the scientific community for the kind of things Dr. Gleick has done, mainstream climate scientists will continue to do them. Indeed, Dr. Gleick’s own actions were no doubt greatly encouraged by the fact that you noble scientists were so full of bul … of scientific integrity that you all let the Climategate un-indicted co-conspirators walk away scot-free, without even asking them the important questions, much less getting answers to those major issues.

You have the opportunity to actually take a principled stand here, Dr. Gundersen, and I cannot overemphasize the importance of you doing so. Dr. Gleick’s kind of unethical skullduggery in the name of science has ruined the reputation of the entire field of climate science. The rot of “noble cause corruption” is well advanced in the field, and it will not stop until people just like you quit looking the other way and pretending it doesn’t exist. I had hoped that some kind of repercussions for scientific malfeasance would be one of the outcomes of Climategate, but people just ignored that part. This one you can’t ignore.

Megan McCardle, reflecting on her career as a journalist, wonders what could possibly motivate a scientist of Gleick’s stature to jeopardize his career for such small potential gains:

The very, very best thing that one can say about this [Gleick's theft and publication of the Heartland documents] is that this would be an absolutely astonishing lapse of judgement for someone in their mid-twenties, and is truly flabbergasting coming from a research institute head in his mid-fifties.  Let’s walk through the thought process:

You receive an anonymous memo in the mail purporting to be the secret climate strategy of the Heartland Institute.  It is not printed on Heartland Institute letterhead, has no information identifying the supposed author or audience, contains weird locutions more typical of Heartland’s opponents than of climate skeptics, and appears to have been written in a somewhat slapdash fashion.  Do you:

A.  Throw it in the trash

B.  Reach out to like-minded friends to see how you might go about confirming its provenance

C.  Tell no one, but risk a wire-fraud conviction, the destruction of your career, and a serious PR blow to your movement by impersonating a Heartland board member in order to obtain confidential documents.

As a journalist, I am in fact the semi-frequent recipient of documents promising amazing scoops, and depending on the circumstances, my answer is always “A” or “B”, never “C”.

It’s a gross violation of journalistic ethics, though perhaps Gleick would argue that he’s not a journalist–and in truth, it’s hard to feel too sorry for Heartland, given how gleefully they embraced the ClimateGate leaks.  So leave ethics aside: wasn’t he worried that impersonating board members in order to obtain confidential material might be, I don’t know, illegal?  Forget about the morality of it: the risk is all out of proportion to the possible reward.

I suspect that Gleick’s “frustration” was actually just hatred — a notoriously bad counselor.

McCardle summarizes evidence indicating that Gleick forged the fake strategy memo, including:

The other thing one must note is that his story is a little puzzling.  We know two things about the memo:

1.  It must have been written by someone who had access to the information in the leaked documents, because it uses precise figures and frequent paraphrases.

2.  It was probably not written by anyone who had intimate familiarity with Heartland’s operations, because it made clear errors about the Koch donations–the amount, and the implied purpose.  It also hashed the figures for a sizable program, and may have made other errors that I haven’t identified.

Did someone else gain access to the documents, write up a fake memo, and then snail mail that memo to Dr. Gleick?  Why didn’t they just send him everything?

If an insider was the source of the memo, as some have speculated, why did it get basic facts wrong? (I have heard a few suggestions that this was an incredibly elaborate sting by Heartland.  If so, they deserve a prominent place in the supervillain Hall of Fame.)

Why did the initial email to the climate bloggers claim that Heartland was the source of all the documents, when he couldn’t possibly have known for sure that this was where the climate strategy memo came from?

Why was this mailed only to Gleick?  Others were mentioned in the memo, but none of them seem to have been contacted–I assume that after a week of feeding frenzy, anyone else who was mailed a copy would have said something by now.

How did his anonymous correspondent know that Gleick would go to heroic lengths to obtain confidential material which confirmed the contents, and then distribute the entire package to the climate blogs?

How did the anonymous correspondent get hold of the information in the memo?

If he didn’t write the memo, how did [Steven] Mosher [see my Update in yesterday's post] correctly identify his involvement?  A good portion of Mosher’s argument was based on the similarity in writing styles. Is this an amazing coincidence?  Was the author of the memo engaged in an elaborate conspiracy to destroy Gleick?

Finally, McCardle strikes a note similar to Eschenbach’s, warning scientists that lying in what they believe is a good cause is bound to discredit both them and their cause:

Gleick has done enormous damage to his cause and his own reputation, and it’s no good to say that people shouldn’t be focusing on it.  If his judgement is this bad, how is his judgement on matters of science?  For that matter, what about the judgement of all the others in the movement who apparently see nothing worth dwelling on in his actions?

When skeptics complain that global warming activists are apparently willing to go to any lengths–including lying–to advance their worldview, I’d say one of the movement’s top priorities should be not proving them right.  And if one rogue member of the community does something crazy that provides such proof, I’d say it is crucial that the other members of the community say “Oh, how horrible, this is so far beyond the pale that I cannot imagine how this ever could have happened!” and not, “Well, he’s apologized and I really think it’s pretty crude and opportunistic to make a fuss about something that’s so unimportant in the grand scheme of things.”

Whining about the way in which the media covers climate change stories is probably absolutely a waste of time, but many mainstream media outlets seem to consistently misinterpret (intentionally or unintentionally) the skeptical position on climate change.

This is to be expected from organizations who are well-established as being on the other side of the fence (I will call them climate hawks, which I believe is a neutral term), but one would like to think that the allegedly objective media would make an effort to at least accurately express the views of those they write about (the U.S. is, admittedly, better than many things I’ve read from Europe):

I don’t know every small detail regarding Heartland’s attitude towards climate change, but I’ll work off of Joe Bast’s recent comments to the WSJ.

Where do we start?

**

The San Francisco Chronicle

Peter Gleick, a MacArthur Foundation fellow and co-founder and president of Oakland’s Pacific Institute, admitted Monday that he had posed as someone else and obtained confidential internal papers from the Heartland Institute, a libertarian group that has questioned the reality of human-caused global warming.

Heartland officials claim at least one of the memos that Gleick fed to bloggers and Internet sites is phony and they are accusing him of theft.

When Heartland is framed as “questioning the reality,” it quickly instructs S.F. readers to toss H.I. into the “crazy reality-denying community” and subsequently align themselves with the reality based community. In the video linked to above, Bast describes Heartland’s position on climate change as generally accepting that the earth has warmed in the past century, but more skeptical towards the rate and costs/benefits of future warming.

I think it would be significantly more charitable to describe that along the lines of “questioning the severity and consequences of climate change” rather than merely stating that H.I. opposes reality. To indulge their personal beliefs, the reporter could even throw in a line that the H.I.’s stance towards the severity and costs/benefits of future climate change is markedly in opposition to professional group x, y, and z.

**

The New York Times:

While the documents offer a rare glimpse of the internal thinking motivating the campaign against climate science, defenders of science education were preparing for battle even before the leak. Efforts to undermine climate-science instruction are beginning to spread across the country, they said, and they fear a long fight similar to that over the teaching of evolution in public schools.

…

Heartland did declare one two-page document to be a forgery, although its tone and content closely matched that of other documents that the group did not dispute. In an apparent confirmation that much of the material, more than 100 pages, was authentic, the group apologized to donors whose names became public as a result of the leak.

This was written prior to Peter Gleick admitting that he impersonated a board member in order to obtain H.I. documents. Nonetheless, it is still misleading.

First, we see that H.I. is allegedly waging a campaign against climate change. Again, completely uncharitable, for the same reasons discussed above. If you’re still unconvinced, check out the conferences that the Heartland Institute sponsored in 2011 and years past, including a number of prominent voices who spoke at the conference in favor of significant carbon reductions (check the talks given by Robert Mendelson, and the debate between Scott Denning and Roy Spencer).

You might believe that the H.I. is completely in the wrong with respect to the severity and costs of future climate change (and policy desires), but is it really fair to ascribe their motivations as launching a campaign against climate science when their own conferences invite scientists and economists who disagree with them, especially in what is supposed to be an objective media outlet?

You can also read the “climate strategy memo,” which a strong majority of analysts who oppose H.I.’s climate views believe are fake. I haven’t seen any credible analysts from the climate hawk camp dispute the likelihood of the strategy memo being fake. The content might match what the H.I. is doing, but the tone is different, and the faked memo is specifically worded in a way to make the Heartland Institute look bad, via language that does not align with how the H.I. publicly represents their intentions. The Times asserts that they are one in the same.

From the fake document:

His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.

A campaign to dissuade teachers from teaching science sounds significantly more pernicious than designing a curriculum in order to provide what H.I. believes is a more balanced approach to the state of climate change science. Now obviously those who are firmly entrenched in the climate-hawk camp, they are one in the same, but is markedly different from the H.I.’s intentions.

**

An E&E article($):

The conservative Chicago think tank is an active funder of efforts to shed doubt on man-made climate change. It sponsors an annual anti-climate science conference and maintains an active communications operation that, among other things, has promoted the 2009 “Climategate” event, which involves the theft of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

“anti-climate science,” no need to say more.

**

The Guardian:

However, the statement from Heartland communications director, Jim Lakely, identifies only one of the eight documents posted online on Tuesday night by the DeSmogBlog website as a “total fake”. That document, two pages headlined “Confidential Memo: Heartland Climate Strategy”, largely duplicates information contained in the other documents.

Those documents – containing details on future projects such as a $100,000 campaign to “dissuade teachers from teaching science“, as well as fundraising efforts – have been confirmed, in part, by Heartland itself, corporate donors such as Microsoft, and climate sceptic blogger Anthony Watts, who hoped to benefit from Heartland fundraising this year.

Again, the distinction mentioned above is important, which they leave out to paint a narrative of some evil non-profit group trying to fill your child’s head with lies. The fake document stated that H.I. wanted to “dissuade teachers from teaching science” which is not what the project was about, it was providing a summary of the science as the H.I. sees it. Possibly a wrong view, but certainly not an attempt to keep all talk of climate change out of the conversation.

**

It is frustrating when allegedly objective media outlets create a nice little David v. Goliath story of heroic climate scientists under siege from evil-think-tank doing the bidding of evil oil companies, while tossing in a dose of “they’re trying to manipulate your children” as an added touch. The media’s siding with the “climate hawks” here is quite similar to the Climategate event of years past, where the media quickly aligned with the “move along, nothing to see here” narrative, which again, seems flatly incorrect (read extensive details, with citations, by Stephen McIntyre on the revelations from Climategate e-mails.)

Brad Plumer of The Washington Post has a more even-handed take on the release of the Heartland Institute documents. A writer for the Post’s Post-Partisan blog has a much less even-handed take (though note that this is from an  opinion/editorial section).