New Evidence Released in Fakegate Global Warming Scandal

Somewhat Reasonable

Peter Gleick

The Heartland Institute today released more evidence that Pacific Institute President Peter Gleick was the likely author of a fake “climate strategy memo” that Gleick originally claimed came from a “Heartland insider,” and later said he received “in the mail” from an anonymous source.

Heartland released a computer forensics report, conducted by Protek International, which states: “We conclude that the Memo did not originate on the Heartland System. It was not created on the Heartland System and was never present there prior to its February 14 posting online.”

The new report contradicts disgraced climate scientist Gleick’s claim to have received the memo from someone affiliated with The Heartland Institute and adds to a growing body of evidence pointing to Gleick’s guilt. A month ago, Juola & Associates, the premier provider of expert analysis and testimony in the field of text and authorship, said “it is more likely than not that Gleick is in fact the author/compiler of the document entitled ‘Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,’ and further that the document does not represent a genuine strategy memo from the Heartland Institute.”

Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast said: “The Protek International forensic report is one more piece of evidence that Peter Gleick created the fake document with the intent of defaming us and the scientists we work with. He and his coconspirators are so desperate to discredit anyone who disagrees with their alarmist views on man-made global warming that they are willing to lie, steal, and even defraud their own friends and allies in the media.”

Bast added: “We once again call on Gleick to make a full confession, and on the Pacific Institute and its allies to stop defending Gleick and his unethical and illegal conduct.”

Background:

On February 20, Gleick, a prominent climate scientist, confessed to being the anonymous party who obtained confidential corporate documents from The Heartland Institute and circulated them along with a document titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy.” While confessing to using fraud to obtain the stolen documents, he claimed to have received the “climate strategy” memo anonymously in the mail.

Since “Fakegate” occurred, ThinkProgress, Greenpeace, 350.org, and other radical environmental groups have been using the stolen and fake documents to attack Heartland’s corporate donors and the scientists who work with it.

The Protek investigation was conducted by Protek co-founder Daniel Bellich, a 27-year veteran of the FBI and former supervisor of the Chicago Division’s Special Operations Group, and Keith G. Chval, former chief of the High Tech Crimes Bureau of the Illinois Attorney General’s Office and president of the Chicago Chapter of The American Society of Digital Forensics and Electronic Discovery. Both men signed the report on April 20, certifying they would swear to its findings in a court of law.

For more information about the global warming scandal and the complete forensic report from Protek International, visit Fakegate.org or contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at jlakely@heartland.org and 312/377-4000.

Global Warming Rides Again

Blogcritics

Have you ever heard of Fakegate? It seems that Dr. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and (now past) chairman of an American Geophysical Union task force on scientific ethics and integrity,(isn't that ironic?) stole the identity of a member of The Heartland Institute's board of directors and then used that identity to steal documents describing Heartland's budget, fundraising plans, and more. When those documents failed to produce what he wanted, Gleick or an ally forged a memo alleging to describe Heartland's "Global Warning Strategy."

On February 14, 2012, Gleick sent the stolen and forged documents to fifteen allies in the environmental movement and the MSM, resulting in a wave of criticism of Heartland's supposed plans to "infiltrate schools" and "undermine" climate science. Gleick confessed to stealing the documents on February 20, 2012, but MSM coverage of the event focused overwhelmingly on the false claims in the fake memo rather than on Gleick's criminal actions.

In 2011 Gleick led a new task force on scientific ethics and integrity for the American Geophysical Union. Then on February 16, 2012, he resigned from the task force citing "personal, private reasons." But his reasons soon became very public. On February 20, 2012, Dr. Gleick admitted to having fraudulently obtained documents of a board meeting of The Heartland Institute under someone else's name for the purpose of making its donors known. Gleick also forged a two-page strategy memo purporting that the Institute was engaged in a variety of efforts to fraudulently undermine the claims of global warming scientists. The Institute did not have to, nor ever did engage, in any such efforts. The truth about the global warming claims was sufficient to undermine them. This analysis, by Heartland President Joseph Bast, refutes claims that appear in Gleick's forged memo.

So the questions are, (1) If AGW is real, as Gleick contends, and if 97-98 percent of scientists worldwide agree with him, as Gleick contends, then why did Gleick resort to identity theft and forgery to try discredit his opposition? and (2) Does Gleick know that his actions speak loudly about his and AGW's credibility?

Warmists confirmed as cheats, liars, fakers; Pope still Catholic; etc

Editor's Note:  This editorial is not so gracious in its reporting of 'Fakegate', but contains an excellent comparison of climate-gate coverage to the Heartland email release.

Telegraph
James Delingpole

Peter Gleick (right) recoils from the Spear of Truth

I wonder how the BBC environment correspondent Richard Black would report it if the Climatic Research Unit's Phil Jones were suddenly to confess that everything he'd said in the last two decades about the anthropogenic warming threat was total rubbish. I'm guessing something like: "Hero climate scientist announces glorious discovery: world saved, research at CRU now shows!"

I wonder how the New York Times, or the Guardian environment pages or Huffington Post would report it if NASA's James Hansen were to burst in with a machine gun and grenades at the next Heartland climate sceptics' conference and wipe out half the delegates. "NASA expert helps solve global overpopulation problem!", probably.

If you think I'm joking consider how all the above-mentioned organs responded to the story of Fakegate, in which climate activist Peter Gleick engaged in identity theft and used a forged document in order to smear the Heartland institute with a pack of lies. The way they covered it, you'd think the real villain of the piece was not Gleick but Heartland. One liberal commentator went so far as to suggest that the person who had faked the one (and only) incriminating document was none other than Heartland's president Joe Bast. Some kind of sinister, false-flag operation to make the environmental movement look bad, I suppose. (Yeah, like it needs any help on that score).

Anyway, now Anthony Watts reports that the forged document has been submitted to forensic analysis and that the most likely culprit turns out to be – as Steven Mosher suspected weeks ago – none other than Peter Gleick. Well quelle surprise and whoulda thunk?! Gleick denies it. Well of course he would. Looks kind of embarrassing, doesn't it, when your cause is so desperate that the only dirt you can manage to get on your opposition is dirt you've manufactured yourself?

After Climategate Donna Laframboise asked in a Tweet:

To those minimizing ClimateGate: How badly do people have to behave? What line must they cross before you’ll stop excusing them?

And after Gleickgate/Fakegate she asked a similar question. Just how badly does the alarmist/warmist camp have to behave before their amen corner in their liberal MSM finally concedes that their behaviour is beyond the pale?

The answer, I fear, is more badly than you could possibly imagine. Climatism (as Steve Goreham calls it) has very little to do with science, if indeed it ever did. Rather it's the new global religion and as with all religions it's really not about evidence but about faith. And when you're filled with zeal of religious conviction, what crime is there that you wouldn't commit to spread your wondrous, right and noble creed?

As a perfect example of this blind faith in action, Jo Nova compares and contrasts the coverage of two stories – Climategate and Fakegate – by our old friend Richard Black of the BBC.

On ClimateGate, Black waited until after he had a spokesman from the CRU to comment, and having confirmed the emails were from the CRU, Black quoted exactly none of them. On FakeGate, Black posted so quickly that he had to rewrite it after Heartland replied, which happened in the first 24 hours.

With ClimateGate, Black ignored the emails that were effectively public property in the first place and turned out to be real. With Fakegate, Black either detailed or linked to quotes that turned out to be nonexistent (at least, I presume that’s what he needed to “re-work”, where is the original stored?).

'Fakegate' Follows 'Climategate'

TownHall
Peter Ferrara 

About every four years, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces a voluminous Assessment Report (AR) on the state of global warming science, such as it is. Two years after each AR, the IPCC produces an updating Interim Report.

In 2008, The Heartland Institute, headquartered in Chicago, began organizing international conferences of scientists from across the globe who want to raise and discuss intellectually troubling questions and doubts regarding the theory that human activity is causing ultimately catastrophic global warming. Six conferences have taken place to date, attracting more than 3,000 scientists, journalists, and interested citizens from all over the world.

(Full disclosure: I am a Heartland Senior Fellow, one of several affiliations I have with free-market think tanks and advocacy groups.)

In 2009, Heartland published Climate Change Reconsidered: The Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). That 860-page careful, dispassionate, thoroughly scientific volume, produced in conjunction with the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) and the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, explored the full range of alternative views to the UN's IPCC. Two years later, Heartland published the 418 page Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2011 Interim Report of the NIPCC, which updated the research regarding global warming and "climate change" since the 2009 volume.

Through these activities and more like them, Heartland has become the international headquarters of the scientific alternative to the UN's IPCC, now providing full scale rebuttals to the UN's own massive reports. Any speaker, any authority, any journalist or bureaucrat asserting the catastrophic danger of supposed man-caused global warming needs to be asked for their response to Climate Change Reconsidered. If they have none, then they are not qualified to address the subject.

This is the essential background to understanding "Fakegate," the strange and still being written story of the decline and fall of political activist Peter Gleick, who had successfully engineered a long career posing as an objective climate scientist. Gleick, who has announced he is taking a "temporary, short-term leave of absence" as president of the Pacific Institute, also served until recently as chairman of the science integrity task force of the American Geophysical Union.

Gleick has publicly confessed that he contacted The Heartland Institute fraudulently pretending to be a member of the Board of Directors. Emails released by The Heartland Institute show that he created an email address similar to that of a board member and used it to convince a staff member to send him confidential board materials. Gleick then forwarded the documents to 15 global warming alarmist advocacy organizations and sympathetic journalists, who immediately posted them online and blogged and wrote about them.

Their expectation apparently was that the documents would be as embarrassing and damaging to the global warming skeptics as were the emails revealed in the "Climategate" scandal to the alarmist side. The Climategate revelations showed scientific leaders of the UN's IPCC and global warming alarmist movement plotting to falsify climate data and exclude those raising doubts about their theories from scientific publications, while coordinating their message with supposedly objective mainstream journalists.

The Gleick affair is further proof of the warmists' endless credulity

Editor's Note:  Gleick was suspected at first because of the similarities between the two-page strategy paper and Gleick's style of writing.  Gleik confesses, then claims that the emails he obtained were aimed at confirming the anonymously written strategy paper.  He still claims he didn't write the strategy paper despite the fact it was the Gleick-like writing in the strategy paper that implicated Gleick in the first place.  Gleick either thinks we are really stupid or is taking a position to soften the liability he is bound to incur.

That said, why is it so difficult to dig up dirt from an industry-funded nonprofit with an axe to grind?  That finding alone has no real comparison to the two sets of emails hacked at East Anglia.   Climate-gate emails (both the first and second batch) shine a light on the primary scientific body and source of analysis and data fed to the IPCC- a significant difference.


The Telegraph


Dr Peter Gleick provides more evidence that the supporters of the Cause will stop at nothing.

What a very odd situation we find ourselves in, due to the extraordinary transformation in recent years of the so-called debate over global warming. Last week, The Sunday Telegraph reported that, as part of Britain’s overseas aid budget, the Department for International Development is well on the way to spending £1.5 billion on a mass of climate-related projects across the world. These range from helping Indian farmers to irrigate their fields with foot-powered pumps rather than diesel-fuelled ones, to preventing the authority of Kenyan “rainmakers” from being undermined by the onset of “extreme weather events”.

This is bizarre enough – and it might be added that, according to the World Resources Institute, Britain is now spending far more on this kind of nonsense, under the UN’s $28 billion Fast Start Climate Change programme, than any country in the world apart from Japan. But even this is only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of billions Britain is hoping to spend, as a consequence of our Government’s unique obsession with global warming, on everything from climate-related research in our universities to building the 32,000 useless windmills that Chris Huhne was babbling about, before he ignominiously left office. We cannot recall often enough that our Climate Change Act commits us to spending more than £700 billion between now and 2050 – far more than any other country in the world.

Yet while successive British governments have plunged headlong into this madness, the “science” supposedly used to justify it has been falling apart in all directions. Global temperatures have signally failed to rise as the computer models, upon which the whole scare was based, said they should. And an endless succession of scandals has engulfed the senior scientists who did more than anyone else to promote the scare. These began with the exposure of the notorious “hockey stick” graph and then the Climategate emails which showed how they fiddled their data and stopped at nothing to discredit anyone who challenged what they called “the Cause”. The scandals continued with the revelations that much of the work of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the supreme champion of the Cause – had not been based on science at all but on scare stories dreamed up by environmental activists.

All this has left the debate over climate change in a depressingly fetid state, as supporters of the orthodoxy lash out with increasing desperation, forlornly trying to defend their crumbling faith. A further example of this was the strange little scandal that erupted last week, with the release on the internet of various documents from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think-tank long vilified by the warmists for organising conferences attended by hundreds of distinguished scientists from across the world who dare to be sceptical of the orthodoxy.

The documents were entirely innocuous except for one, which stood out from the rest because it purported to be a secret “strategy paper” that outlined Heartland’s plans to get the teaching of the science of climate change outlawed in America’s schools. This seemingly damning revelation aroused much excitement among warmists on both sides of the Atlantic. The Guardian published no less than nine separate items about it.

Breaking: Eminent Scientist May be Jailed for Faking Climate Emails

Climate Change Dispatch
John O'Sullivan

Peter Gleick

In a sensational public confession a leading climatologist, Peter Gleick has admitted to taking part in a high-profile climate emails forgery that has backfired; says it was done to intentionally injure skeptic foundation.

Britain’s pro-green national daily, ‘The Guardian’ was the first major newspaper to break the news that Dr. Peter Gleick had confessed to unlawfully libeling the prominent climate skeptic supporter, the Heartland Institute (HI). Heartland is a 28-year-old national nonprofit organization with offices in Chicago, Illinois and Washington, DC. Its mission is “to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.”

Stopping short of specifically admitting he was the author of the faked Heartland Institute document, Gleick nonetheless spilled the beans that he was a co-conspirator, via the Huffington Post late last night (February 20, 2012). Gleick admits that his political bias on climate catastrophism led him to commit “ a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics.”

In reply Heartland Institute President Joseph L. Bast immediately issued an official statement declaring,

"Gleick's crime was a serious one. The documents he admits stealing contained personal information about Heartland staff members, donors, and allies, the release of which has violated their privacy and endangered their personal safety.”

Climate Criminality to Promote Failing Alarmist Agenda

Gleick, an eminent climate scientist promoting the man-made global warming meme, had jumped off his lofty establishment pedestal to admit that he had knowingly intented to cause injury and defame HI, a registered charity.

Dr. Gleick added he would “not comment on the substance or implications of the materials.” But there can be no doubt that the tone of his letter suggests it was drafted under the direct guidance of an attorney.

Heartland Institute lawyers have announced they will mount a prosecution in a civil court for knowingly using a fraudulent instrument to inflict intentional injury upon the prominent skeptic foundation.