Heartland may take civil action, but they have a limited budget and Gleick, backed by the liberal establishment, has access to essentially unlimited funds to defend. I doubt Heartland could afford to sue.

Following that, Gleick gets rehabilitated rapidly and probably gets appointed to various official bodies dealing with “science” and scientific ethics . Possibly he’s a shoo-in as the next head of the IPCC as he would bring all the necessary qualities to that position.

That’s actually pretty tricky to do. Mosher is ubiquitous. He posted heavily on Lucia’s Blackboard on 15, 16, 17 February. See: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2012/tell-me-whats-horrible-about-this/

His money quote for me (the “angry man” theory), was on Climate Audit. http://climateaudit.org/2012/02/23/heartlands-invitation-to-gleick-details/ . See the post at 24 Feb, 12:24 a.m. where he noted:

The crime is not about the science. not about the cause. The motive, the governing emotion, is anger and revenge. Brought on by humiliation, fanned by pride.

This analysis is consistent with the “justification” part of the forced confession.

The Lucia postings effectively track why very early on he discerned it was Gleick (based on how the memo was drafted).

I would not, at this stage, suggest that there is a definitive conclusion: rather, that the odds are in favour of the memo being forged by Gleick.

Countering that, in my mind, is the language of the forced confession. It has been lawyered. Unless he lied to his lawyer (a foolish thing to do), the confession says he received an anonymous communication. This is not necessarily the same document as the memo, as the “confession” is deliberately ambiguous on this point. However, I find it unlikely that this is a further lie: the compounding of the problem would be immense. Hugely risky strategy on top of a hugely risky strategy.

The only way that would make sense is if they decided to take the chance that by admitting part of what occurred, Gleick avoids an investigation that will reveal the true provenance of the fake memo. If so, that is likely a misreading of what Heartland will now seek to do with this event.

The other challenge – going back to the FFO concept – is that you need to analyse the situation based not on what actually transpired, but on the basis of what reasonably could have been expected to occur, from the perspective of somebody intiating such an undertaking.

On that basis, as I tried to argue, the memo really does not stack up. It’s both too juicy (i.e., too much real info) and too sparse (too difficult to confirm). If it is an FFO, it was wildly lucky (or Heartland, in its secret villain lair) is also employing FBI – grade psych consultant for target selection…).

We will have to wait & see.

Thanks, Ian, for the comments you posted at lies.com. Do you happen to have any links to Mosher’s comments on this question? I’ve seen some of the things he’s written about this, but I’m not sure that I know all the places where he posts his views (which seem to be scattered about on various blogs, rather than concentrated in one place).

Thanks again.

John

An interesting read, but I think you could push the analysis harder than you have. If it was a “false flag” operation, then it was even more amateurish than Gleick’s own fumbling attempt at identity theft. For an assortment of reasons – internal lack of official indicia of authenticity, lack of names/distribution list, not even a real date – there really wasn’t enough there to expect Gleick (as his persona was understood PRIOR to the event) to do anything more than dump the thing in the wastebasket. Certainly, you could not have hoped that he would engage in identity theft and wire fraud.

I’ve made an attempt at starting such an analysis over on John’s Lies.com site. It needs refinement though.

John is correct that nothing we currently “know” definitively rules out the possibility of someone creating and delivering the memo in an effort to get Gleick to do something stupid. When you analyze – from the perspective of the evil doers – what an FFO would be attempting to achieve, what would be gained/potentially lost and consider what the memo actually looks and reads like, however, this seems very unlikely.

I think Mosher’s “angry man” assessment, which fits the facts as we currently know them better and more readily, is currently the best analysis we have.

John, that was a very gentlemanly letter and if all proponents of AGW were so humble and open minded I don’t think things would have ever gotten this far. Gleick could certainly take a lesson from you in that regard.

In my mind I think there are a couple of things that argue against the mark turning the con onto the conman in such a fashion. I guess one is that I can’t think of an example of this ever happening outside of counter intelligence, or perhaps, police work. Heartland would have had to realize they were being duped and turned the tables on Gleick in a very short period of time. I can’t imagine something like that being done on a whim by a single person at Heartland and institutions don’t seem capable of doing anything quickly or without consultation amongst a lot of individuals who could potentially spill the beans.

And here is the key… at the point they understood what Gleick was doing they would have had him dead to rights on some very serious charges and there would have been no reason to frame him or send him false documents. The damage had already been done to Gleick’s cause once word got out of the crimes he had already committed.

Even were Heartland as malevolent as they are accused of being they would have been taking a huge risk for little gain and they would know the AGW movement would circle the wagons and not believe their denials as to the authenticity of the document. You have to understand that skeptics think the warmists live in a fantasy world so conspiracy theories about the documents and excuses for Gleick’s behavior would have been expected. I will leave it to you to judge whether they were right in that assessment but it seems clear that there just wasn’t enough to be gained for Heartland to try to frame a man who had already hanged himself in a very public fashion.

And here’s the second point. If they were going to set a trap why would they not have chosen something where there would be no doubt as to the fraud? Why choose something where it is a he said/they said situation?

And finally I think the actions of Gleick vs. Heartland after the fact says it all. Heartland called the FBI. Do you really think they would double down on a strategy of planting a fake document by bringing in the feds and making loud public claims as to fraud?

I guess we could pretend that it is possible that a third party provided the document… at just the right time and to just the right party… but that defies all probability and reason unless Gleick was publicly advertising for such things to be sent to him. The whole third party scenario smacks too much of the Lucy Ramirez fantasy Rather and the rest concocted to explain the source of forgeries that said exactly what they wanted them to say and came exactly when they needed them to come.

So I think while we can never rule anything out totally we can safely say that this sort of argument falls into the category of clutching at straws. About the only thing I could see that would make it slightly more credible would be if Gleick received the memo before he went on his witch hunt. Then he could claim it inspired him to try to gather more information. I haven’t followed this closely enough to know for sure what he is claiming the timeline to be but I don’t think it matters much.

You write:

The author, John Callender, is a liberal in the US sense and is quite a strong, longstanding and well-known AGW blogger, so doubly opposed to most here but definitely not some random bloke on the internet.

I’m admittedly a liberal in the US sense, and I believe strongly in AGW and have been blogging to that effect for a while. But I don’t think “well-known” is accurate. I created lies.com a fairly long time ago (aeons in blog years), but I don’t think I’m especially well-known among the high-profile AGW people. I’m not a scientist, or a journalist. I really am just “some random bloke on the internet” (which is a cool phrase, and if I had a .sig file I would just have added it to it).

I don’t think I’m engaging in false modesty here. I’m as obsessed with my own stature in the online world as the next blogger, and as prone to overstating my own importance. I just don’t think your characterization of me as a “well-known AGW blogger” is actually true. Nobody who is anybody in the AGW bloggy community talks about me or links to me, from which I feel pretty safe in assuming that they don’t actually read me. Well, you linked to me, now. Which (again) I appreciate. But I’m not sure that’s enough to make your characterization true.

So, as I said, it’s just a small correction, but I wanted to get that out there.

My question concerns your assertion of implausibility about the “honeypot” scenario alluded to in item #9. Obviously, I’m obsessed with this idea lately, and it isn’t lost on me that my obsession is based in part on my desire to find an explanation that shifts some of the blame for the current situation off Peter Gleick and onto a Heartland-connected trickster, so I can lessen the cognitive dissonance I’m going through at seeing a (former) leading light of the AGW community revealed as an unprincipled and untrustworthy deceiver.

I’m not trying to argue you out of your belief that the Gleick-as-forger explanation is more credible. I think it probably is more likely to be the correct explanation, especially as more time passes and Gleick fails to produce the evidence supporting his version of the strategy memo’s provenance that you mention in your item #10.

I’m not yet ready to dismiss the honeypot theory completely; I still think it can account for the known facts reasonably well. But maybe that’s because I’m overlooking some objection to it that you’re noticed. So if you could, I would really appreciate it if you could give some more detail as to your reasons for thinking that Glieck-as-victim is less simple, and less plausible, than Gleick-as-forger.

Thanks again.

John Callender
Some random bloke on the Internet

2. I see some alarmists are trying to divert the debate into a debate on transparency in funding. I am not sure this is a smart idea. At the root of this is the idea that people only hold the opinions they hold because they are paid to hold them. True; and as true of alarmists as it is of sceptics. The only difference is that sceptics don’t get paid as much and so – by the alarmists’ own logic – are more trustworthy.

3. The soundtrack to this comment is “Gudbye T’ Jane”. But that’s only because I’ve been listening to a bit too much Slade recently.

smitten…..

I refer you to a posting by Chris Mooney(Link) of that parish (and my response is here(Link)), in which he expresses bemused puzzlement over what he dubs the “sophisticates effect” – “a relationship between more knowledge on the one hand, and climate science skepticism on the other, among conservatives:”

Referring to a Yale study he acknowledges “For citizens as a whole, more literacy and numeracy were correlated with somewhat more, rather than somewhat less, dismissal of the risk of global warming.”

He then goes on to say
“In my experience, climate skeptics are nothing if not confident in their ability to challenge the science of climate change—and even to competently recalculate (and scientifically and mathematically refute) various published results. It’s funny how this high-level intellectual firepower is always used in service of debunking—rather than affirming or improving—mainstream science. But the fact is, if you go to blogs like WattsUpWithThat or Climate Audit, you certainly don’t find scientific and mathematical illiterates doubting climate change. Rather, you find scientific and mathematical sophisticates itching to blow holes in each new study.”

What Mr Mooney clearly doesn’t appreciate that setting out with the intention of ‘affirming’ “mainstream science” is about as unscientific as you can get. The thought of blowing holes in a study is what should be getting scientists out of bed every day.

He can’t evaluate the arguments about science because he clearly has no understanding of the philosophy which underpins, or should underpin, all scientific endeavour.

That you can’t debunk something which isn’t bunk to start with goes straight past him.

This is the standard of scientific understanding demonstrated on one of the leading warmist advocacy sites.