“This is just the latest episode in the sorry and increasingly poisonous politics of global warming.”
Ron Bailey writes at Reason.com:
…The upshot is that it would appear that Gleick was so excited by the anonymously sent “strategy paper” that he decided that he must resort to “a serious lapse of [his] own and professional judgment and ethics” to further expose the wicked plans of the Heartland Institute. Basically, it looks like Gleick’s confirmation bias (“I just know that the Heartland folks are wittingly evil”) overcame whatever sense of morality and fair play that he may harbor. To paraphrase, Gleick apparently concluded that extremism in the defense of climate “alarmism” is no vice.
Atlantic Senior Editor Megan McArdle has done two really insightful and careful analyses, here and here, of the “strategy document” in which she pretty much proves (to my satisfaction at least) that it is a fake.
It does bear mentioning that the “alarmists” often claim that the shadowy campaign attacking true climate science (it is “settled”) is being paid for by Big Oil. The Heartland documents reveal no donations from Big Oil, and the Koch Foundation (see Koch derangement syndrome) donation appears to be targeted toward health policy, not energy or climate policy….
“Atlantic Senior Editor Megan McArdle has done two really insightful….”
Aaaaand that’s where Bailey lost all credibility.
Assunming he had any, seeing as how he doesn’t address the content of the rest of the documents, just tsk-tsk’s over how they were obtained.