(Revised March 8, 2012)

Donna Laframboise asks the key question about Fakegate: “Where do Gleick Apologists Draw the Line?”

In a recent post on her Web site, No Frakking Consensus, she provides excerpts from scientists, ethicists, and activists who excuse or even lionize Peter Gleick for stealing Heartland Institute budget documents, impersonating a Heartland board member, misrepresenting himself to bloggers as an anonymous “Heartland insider,” and palming off as genuine – maybe also authoring — a fake climate strategy document in which Koch supposedly funds Heartland to keep opposing voices out of Forbes magazine, sell doubt as their product, and dissuade teachers from teaching science.

Laframboise comments: “Climate change is a strange beast. When it enters the room, even ethicists lose the ability to think straight.”

At the end of her post, she asks Gleick’s apologists what other unlawful actions they believe would be justified if necessary to advance their cause:

I get it. Lying and stealing and misleading are OK so long as they help advance a good cause. What else is acceptable? Old fashioned burglary? Arson? Car bombs?

Where is the line?

There is no moral equivalence between Gleick’s theft of Heartland’s budget documents and the release of Climate Research Unit (CRU) emails — quite possibly by a whistle blower — that triggered the Climategate scandal.

The CRU is a tax-funded organization; thus, its research and work-related emails are subject to freedom of information laws. Heartland is a privately-funded organization; thus, its planning documents are not subject to such laws. As we know from the Climategate emails, CRU scientists stonewalled FOIA requests for years to prevent independent researchers from checking their data and methods. That was a bona fide scandal, not only because evading FOIA is unlawful, but also because scientists who deny independent researchers the opportunity to reproduce (invalidate) their results attack the very heart of the scientific enterprise.

Leaking the CRU emails was the only way to (a) produce documents responsive to valid FOIA requests, (b) expose CRU’s willful evasion of FOIA, and (c) subject CRU research products to the indispensable scientific test of reproducibility. Gleick’s theft of the Heartland documents served no legal or scientific-integrity objective. The Heartland documents reveal no breach of professional ethics or law, which is why somebody (Gleick?) had to fabricate a ‘confidential climate strategy memo’ to make Heartland look bad.

Nonetheless, warmistas such as DeSmog Blog, which published the purloined Heartland documents, applaud Gleick as a whistle blower, and stubbornly insist the fake strategy memo is genuine, loudly denounced Climategate as the work of an “illegal hack” of emails “stolen” from the CRU server.

The Gleick affair thus brings into sharp focus what has been apparent for some time, namely, the warmist movement is imbued with a ‘one law for me, another for thee‘ mentality. Such a mindset is toxic to democracy and scientific integrity alike.

As DeSmog Blog sees the world, those who espouse Gorthodoxy have a moral right to (1) flout FOIA and the rules of scientific discourse, and (2) violate the legal rights of climate alarm skeptics. DeSmog and its allies fancy themselves cutting-edge defenders of “the science.” In fact, their mentality is thoroughly medieval.

In Europe’s wars of religion, sectarians often tried to justify unconscienable behavior on the grounds that they had no ethical or legal obligations to “heretics” (i.e., anyone who believed differently than they did). John Locke excoriated this pious fraud in his Letter Concerning Toleration:

Another more secret evil, but more dangerous to the commonwealth, is when men arrogate to themselves, and to those of their own sect, some peculiar prerogative covered over with a specious show of deceitful words, but in effect opposite to the civil right of the community. For example: we cannot find any sect that teaches, expressly and openly, that men are not obliged to keep their promise; that princes may be dethroned by those that differ from them in religion; or that the dominion of all things belongs only to themselves. For these things, proposed thus nakedly and plainly, would soon draw on them the eye and hand of the magistrate and awaken all the care of the commonwealth to a watchfulness against the spreading of so dangerous an evil. But, nevertheless, we find those that say the same things in other words. What else do they mean who teach that faith is not to be kept with heretics? Their meaning, forsooth, is that the privilege of breaking faith belongs unto themselves; for they declare all that are not of their communion to be heretics, or at least may declare them so whensoever they think fit [emphasis added].

DeSmoggers adhere to a similar doctrine: No faith with skeptics. Gleickists (for want of a better term) act on the presumption that when dealing with skeptics, almost any dishonest and underhanded action is okay, or even honorable. They are orthodox (to themselves), which supposedly gives them a right to lie to skeptics, steal from them, manufacture scandals to destroy their careers, politicize professional certification to keep skeptics out of jobs, collude to keep their papers out of the peer-reviewed literature, even accuse skeptics (or their industry allies) of treason (an offense punishable by death) and high crimes against humanity and nature.

The pre-modern sectarians who preached ”no faith with heretics” rejected the civil and religious equality essential to a free society. Locke urged magistrates not to tolerate anyone preaching such intolerance.

Thomas Jefferson improved on Locke, arguing that the best way to deal with intolerant sects is to let them discredit themselves in the marketplace of ideas. Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom concludes by affirming:

. . .that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

Gleick and his apologists have discredited themselves far more than any Heartland Institute climate science report, climate conference, or global warming curriculum could accomplish.

Fortunately, nothing I say here will make them wise up.

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).

Updated 4:34 pm, Feb. 21, 2012

“Climate scientist Peter Gleick has acknowledged that he was the person who convinced the Heartland Institute to hand over the contents of its January Board package, authenticating the documents beyond a doubt and further exposing the disinformation campaign Heartland has pursued in the last week, trying to discredit the information,” writes DeSmog Blog in a post titled “Whistleblower Authenticates Heartland Documents” (Feb. 20, 2012).

Gleick is indeed the culprit, but he is not a “whistleblower” because to be a candidate for that honorable title, he’d have to be a current or former employee. Gleick acknowledges that he, an outside critic of the organization, solicited and received Heartland documents under false pretenses, an action he describes as a ”serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics.”

More importantly, contrary to DeSmog’s spin, Gleick does not claim to authenticate the document titled ”Confidential Memo: Heartland 2012 Climate Strategy,” the only document among those posted on the DeSmog Web site that even vaguely resembles the stuff of scandal.

Even more pathetic is the sanctimonious open letter by Michael Mann and six colleagues who suggest that Heartland merely got its comeuppance for cheering and publicizing the release of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) emails that sparked the Climategate scandal.

As noted here last week, there is good reason to believe the climate strategy memo, which purports to be a confidential communication to a “subset of Institute Board and senior staff,” is a fake.

The memo says, “We will also pursue additional support from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. They returned as a Heartland donor in 2011 with a contribution of $200,000.” But one of the bona fide stolen board meeting documents, Heartland’s 2012 Fund Raising Plan (p. 22), shows that Koch donated $25,000 in 2011, not $200,000, and for Heartland’s health care program, not its climate science program. Heartland seeks a $200,000 donation from Koch in 2012 — for its health care program, not its climate program. In short, the alleged strategy memo gets basic information –  how much Koch contributed and for which program activities – stunningly wrong. It is almost inconceivable that Heartland would have mailed to key board members and staff a document so egregiously inconsistent with the Institute’s 2012 Fund Raising Plan.

Megan McCardle of The Atlantic reported another reason to be suspicious of the strategy memo. Electronic analysis of the document indicates it was created by someone living in the Pacific time zone, unlike the other documents (aside from the IRS 1099 form), which were created in the Central time zone, where Heartland is headquartered. Just by the bye, Peter Gleick’s organization, the Pacific Institute, is located in the Pacific time zone.

Gleick says he received the strategy memo from an anonymous third party. Maybe, maybe not. In any case, contrary to DeSmog Blog’s editorializing in the guise of reporting, Gleick does not claim to have authenticated the strategy memo:

 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.

Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. 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. 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. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication [emphasis added].

The materials Heartland sent Gleick ’confirm many of the facts’ in the strategy memo because the memo is mostly a pastiche of phrases taken from other documents. But note, Gleick does not say that Heartland mailed him the strategy memo. He also implicitly acknowledges that not all the facts in the strategy memo are confirmed by the other documents. Indeed, as we have seen, the 2012 Fund Raising Plan conflicts with the strategy memo’s assertions regarding the amount and kind of Koch’s 2011 donation.

The only part of the strategy memo that comes even close to scandalous (unless you make the question-begging assumption — Gleick apparently does — that climate skeptics are a scandalous bunch) is the statement that “it is important to keep” scientists like Gleick ”out” of Forbes magazine. Spotlighting this statement, DeSmog Blog accused Heartland of hypocrisy, because the Institute had blasted CRU scientists for trying to keep skeptics out of the peer reviewed literature. But the statement in question is so silly it casts additional doubt on the strategy memo’s authenticity.

How on earth could Heartland keep opposing views out of Forbes? Is Heartland the think-tank tail that wags the financial-empire dog? The “confidential” memo implies that when Heartland President Joe Bast says “jump,” Steve Forbes says “How high?” Anyone credulous enough to believe that probably also believes global warming is a planetary emergency even though annual deaths and death rates related to extreme weather have declined by 93% and 98%, respectively, since the 1920s.

In an open letter published in the UK Guardian,  seven scientists prominently identified with Climategate take a ‘people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’ tone about the bogus Heartland scandal. They write:

So although we can agree that stealing documents and posting them online is not an acceptable practice, we would be remiss if we did not point out that the Heartland Institute has had no qualms about utilizing and distorting emails stolen from scientists.

The Climategate Seven compare apples to oranges — an old rhetorical trick that has no place in scientific discourse. Michael Mann and the CRU gang are funded by taxpayers. Consequently, their data, methodologies, and work-related email are subject to freedom of information laws. The Heartland Institute is a privately-funded organization. Consequently, its internal decision and planning documents are not subject to FOIA.

As we know from the Climategate emails, Phil Jones and CRU scientists stonewalled FOIA requests for years to prevent independent researchers from checking their data and methodologies. That was a bona fide scandal, not only because such conduct is prima facie illegal, but also because scientists who deny independent researchers the opportunity to reproduce (invalidate) their results attack the very heart of the scientific enterprise.

Leaking the CRU emails — for all we know the work of a genuine whistle blower — was the only way to (a) produce documents responsive to valid FOIA requests, (b) expose CRU’s willful evasion of FOIA, and (c) subject CRU research products to the indispensable test of reproducibility.

There is no analogy between Climategate and the theft of the Heartland documents because (1) Heartland has no legal obligation to share its internal deliberations with the public, and (2) unlike collusion to evade FOIA, strategizing about how to raise money is not a violation of either law or professional ethics.

Update: Steven Mosher speculates, based on textual analysis, that Gleick wrote the fake strategy memo he claims was sent to him by an anonymous source. See Mosher’s comment #89946 on The Blackboard and related threads at ClimateAudit.Org: comment #342939, comment #324959, and comment #325062.