Hinderaker: ‘So, Peter Gleick: if I am wrong, sue me’

John Hinderaker explains why he thinks Peter Gleick committed forgery.

Hinderaker writes at PowerLine:

… Gleick didn’t get the document he was hoping for, so he made it up.

Gleick’s memo goes on to discuss the teaching of global warming in schools. Which, by the way, is a scandal, but not in the way the Gleick and his fellow leftists understand. What follows is the biggest howler in Gleick’s fake document:

Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. To counter this we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools…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.

This is almost unbelievably stupid, and it was obviously written by a left-winger who has never read any of Heartland’s sophisticated critiques of global warming hysteria. The idea that conservatives want to “dissuade teachers from teaching science” is the ultimate left-wing fantasy. On the contrary, as Heartland has explained in painstaking detail, it wants teachers to teach science at a far more knowledgeable and sophisticated level than the cartoonish global warming hysteria that is peddled by the likes of Al Gore and Peter Gleick. It is safe to say that no representative of Heartland could have written this paragraph.

At present we sponsor the NIPCC to undermine the official United Nation’s IPCC reports and pid a team of writers $388,000 in 2011 to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered. … NIPCC is currently funded by two gifts a year from two foundations, both of them requesting anonymity.

This paragraph, once again, is evidently intended to be disseminated to a liberal audience; it is implausible as an excerpt from an actual Heartland report. The UN’s “official” IPCC reports are one of the great scandals of our time; they contradict one another in fundamental ways, and all are in conflict with scientific observations. No Heartland insider would have written this paragraph.

Our current budget includes funding for high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist AGW message. At the moment, this funding goes primarily to Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 per month, plus expenses), Robert Carter ($1,667 per month) and a number of other individuals, but we will consider expanding it, if funding can be found.

As with the rest of the memo, this paragraph appears to be aimed at gullible New York Times reporters, not an inner circle of Heartland board members. Gleick now goes on to discredit–with his own liberal base, anyway–a variety of global warming realists:

Heartland plays an important role in climate communications, especially through our in-house experts (e.g., Taylor) through his Forbes blog and related high profile outlets, our conferences, and through coordination with external networks (such as WUWT and other groups capable of rapidly mobilizing responses to new scientific findings, news stories, or unfavorable blog posts).

Who could be dumb enough to fall for this? Not our readers, surely. “WUWT” is Anthony Watts’s site, Watts Up With That?, one of the world’s top resources for scientific news about the Earth’s climate. This paragraph, like others in Gleick’s liberal fantasy, hypothesizes a cosmic coordination among realist web sources and news outlets. Liberals can’t account for how the truth keeps beating them over the head, except by positing a conspiracy of skeptics.

Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as Gleick) to post warmest science essays that counter our own.

This is hilarious, actually. With all due respect to Forbes’s online team of bloggers, they are not exactly the front line of the climate debate–but for the fact that Gleick, the apparent author of the fake memo, has a foothold there. And Gleick, contrary to his own self-description, is not a “climate scientist,” high-profile or otherwise. The forger always flatters his own vanity!

This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.

This is the moment where Gleick jumped the shark, if we can still say that. Those who are skeptical of the Left’s global warming hoax are not “anti-climate,” and the idea that an internal Heartland memo would describe them as such is ludicrous. Nor does anyone on the logical side of the climate debate have any intention of “keep[ing] opposing voices out.” On the contrary, all we want is for the voices of sanity and science to be heard.

One could go on, but that is more than enough. Let me be perfectly clear: I think it is obvious that Peter Gleick fabricated this document–the only one he posted that makes the Heartland Institute look bad–because the real ones he stole from Heartland didn’t serve his partisan purpose. Or, if he didn’t make it up himself, he got it from an ally who fabricated it. No knowledgeable person could mistake Gleick’s hoax for a legitimate top-secret Heartland memo.

So, Peter Gleick: if I am wrong, sue me. If I am right, apologize for fabricating a document and attempting to perpetrate a hoax, and retire from public life.