Replies

Anthony Watts is mentioned in the post at #2.

So from his Blog:

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Posted on February 15, 2012 by Anthony Watts

~~Heartland has yet to produce a press release, but I thought in the meantime I’d share some behind the scenes.~~ If/when they do, I’ll add it to this post.

UPDATE: 11:45AM -The press release has been added below. One of the key documents is a fabrication

UPDATE2: 2:30PM The BBC’s Richard Black slimes me, without so much as asking me a single question (he has my email, I’ve corresponded with him previously) or even understanding what the project is about Hint: Richard, it’s about HIGHS and LOWS, not trends. No journalistic integrity with this one. – Anthony

I’m surprised at the number of articles out there on this where journalists have not bothered to ask me for a statement, but rather rely on their own opinion. To date, only Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian has asked for a statement, and she used very little of it in her article. Her colleague, Leo Hickman asked me no questions at all for his article, but instead relied on a comment I sent to Bishop Hill. So much for journalism. (Update: In response to Hickman, Lucia asks What’s horrible about this?)

(Update: 10:45AM Seth Borenstein of the AP has contacted me and I note that has waited until he can get some kind of confirmation that these documents are real. The Heartland press release is something he’s waiting for. Contacting involved parties is the right way to investigate this story.)

Here’s the query from Goldenberg:

Name: Suzanne Goldenberg
Email: suzanne.goldenberg@xxx.xxx
Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk
Message: Hello, I am seeking comment on the leak of the Heartland
documents by Desmogblog which appear to suggest you are funded by them. Is
this accurate? Thanks

Heartland simply helped me find a donor for funding a special project having to do with presenting some new NOAA surface data in a public friendly graphical form, something NOAA themselves is not doing, but should be. I approached them in the fall of 2011 asking for help, on this project not the other way around.

MY REPLY:

They do not regularly fund me nor my WUWT website, I take no salary from them of any kind.

It is simply for this special project requiring specialized servers, ingest systems, and plotting systems. They also don’t tell me what the project should look like, I came up with the idea and the design. The NOAA data will be displayed without any adjustments to allow easy side-by-side comparisons of stations, plus other graphical representations output 24/7/365. Doing this requires programming, system design, and bandwidth, which isn’t free and I could not do on my own. Compare the funding I asked for initially to
get it started to the millions some other outfits (such as CRU) get in the UK for studies that then end up as a science paper behind a publishers paywall, making the public pay again. My project will be a free public service when finished.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Description from the same (Heartland) documents:
Weather Stations Project
Every few months, weathermen report that a temperature record – either high
or low – has been broken somewhere in the U.S. This is not surprising, since weather is highly variable and reliable instrument records date back less than 100 years old. Regrettably, news of these broken records is often used by environmental extremists as evidence that human emissions are causing either global warming or the more ambiguous “climate change.”

Anthony Watts, a meteorologist who hosts WattsUpwithThat.com, one of the
most popular and influential science blogs in the world, has documented that many of the
temperature stations relied on by weathermen are compromised by heat radiating from nearby buildings, machines, or paved surfaces. It is not uncommon for these stations to over-state temperatures by 3 or 4 degrees or more, enough to set spurious records.
Because of Watts’ past work exposing flaws in the current network of temperature stations (work that The Heartland Institute supported and promoted), the National Aeronautics and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government agency responsible for maintaining temperature stations in the U.S., has designated a new network of higher-quality temperature stations that meet its citing specifications. Unfortunately, NOAA doesn’t widely publicize data from this new network, and puts raw data in spreadsheets buried on one of its Web sites.

Anthony Watts proposes to create a new Web site devoted to accessing the new
temperature data from NOAA’s web site and converting them into easy-to-understand graphs that can be easily found and understood by weathermen and the general interested public. Watts has deep expertise in Web site design generally and is well-known and highly regarded by weathermen and meteorologists everywhere. The new site will be promoted heavily at WattsUpwithThat.com. Heartland has agreed to help Anthony raise $88,000 for the project in 2011. The Anonymous Donor has already pledged $44,000. We’ll seek to raise the balance.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DeSmog, as part of their public relations for hire methodology to demonize skeptics, will of course try to find nefarious motives for this project. But there simply are none here. It’s something that needs doing because NOAA hasn’t made this new data available in a user friendly visual format. For example, here’s a private company website that tracks highs and low records using NOAA data:
http://mapcenter.hamweather.com/records/yesterday/us.html

NOAA doesn’t make any kind of presentation like that either, which is why such things are often done by private ventures.

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That above is what I sent to the Guardian, and also in a comment to Bishop Hill.

The reaction has been interesting, particularly since the David-Goliath nature of funding is laid bare here. For example, Al Gore says he started a 300 million dollar advertising campaign. The Daily Bayonet sums it up pretty well:

Hippies hate Heartland « The Daily Bayonet

What the Heartland document show is how badly warmists have been beaten by those with a fraction of the resources they’ve enjoyed.
Al Gore spent $300 million advertising the global warming hoax. Greenpeace, the WWF, the Sierra Club, The Natural Resources Defense Council, NASA, NOAA, the UN and nation states have collectively poured billions into climate research, alternative energies and propaganda, supported along the way by most of the broadcast and print media.
Yet they’ve been thwarted by a few honest scientists, a number of blogs and a small pile of cash from Heartland.
Here’s a clue for DeSmog, Joe Romm and other warmists enjoying a little schadenfreude today. It’s not the money that’s beating you, it’s the message.
Your climate fear-mongering backfired. You cried wolf so often the villagers stopped listening. Then Climategate I & II gave the world a peek behind the curtain into the shady practices, petty-feuding and data-manipulation that seems to pass for routine in climate ‘science’.
So enjoy the moment, warmists, because what this episode really demonstrates to the world is how little money was needed to bring the greatest scam in history to its knees. That’s not something I’d think you’d want to advertise, but knock yourselves out. It’s what you do best.

I see none of the same people at the Guardian or the blogs complaining about this:

Dr. James Hansen’s growing financial scandal, now over a million dollars of outside income

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.

(Update: Dr. Hansen responds here)

Or the NGO’s and their budgets (thanks Tom Nelson)

With tiny budgets like $310 million, $100 million, and $95 million respectively, how can lovable underdogs like Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and NRDC ever hope to compete with mighty Heartland’s $6.5 million?

Heartland Institute budget and strategy revealed | Deep Climate

Heartland is projecting a boost in revenues from $4.6 million in 2011, to $7.7 million in 2012. That will enable an operating budget of $6.5 million, as well as topping up the fund balance a further $1.2 million.

[Sept 2011]: Greenpeace Environmental Group Turns 40

Greenpeace International, based in Amsterdam, now has offices in more than 40 countries and claims some 2.8 million supporters. Its 1,200-strong staff ranges from “direct action” activists to scientific researchers.
Last year, its budget reached $310 million.

[Nov 2011]: Sierra Club Leader Will Step Down – NYTimes.com

He said the Sierra Club had just approved the organization’s largest annual budget ever, about $100 million for 2012, up from $88 million this year.

[Oct 2011]: Do green groups need to get religion?

That’s Peter Lehner talking. Peter, a 52-year-old environmental lawyer, is executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of America’s most important environmental groups. The NRDC has a $95 million budget, about 400 employees and about 1.3 million members. They’re big and they represent a lot of people.

But me and my little temperature web project to provide a public service are the real baddies here apparently. The dichotomy is stunning.

Some additional added notes:

“Because of Watts’ past work exposing flaws in the current network of temperature stations (work that The Heartland Institute supported and promoted), the National Aeronautics and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government agency responsible for maintaining temperature stations in the U.S., has designated a new network of higher-quality temperature stations that meet its citing specifications.”

For the record, and as previously cited on WUWT, NCDC started on the new network in 2003 http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/crn/annual-reports.html Heartland may have confused the Climate Reference Network with the updated COOP/USHCN modernization network which did indeed start after my surfacestations project: What the modernized USHCN will look like (April 29, 2008)

They then asked for 100 million to update it NOAA/NCDC – USHCN is broken please send 100 million dollars (Sept 21, 2010)

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Moderators, do your best to keep the sort of hateful messages I’ve been getting in the past 18 hours in check in comments below. Please direct related comments from other threads to this one. Commenters please note the site policy.

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PRESS RELEASE 11:45 AM – source http://heartland.org/press-releases/2012/02/15/heartland-institute-responds-stolen-and-fake-documents

FEBRUARY 15, 2012 – The following statement from The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more information, contact Communications Director Jim Lakely at jlakely@heartland.org and 312/377-4000.

Yesterday afternoon, two advocacy groups posted online several documents they claimed were The Heartland Institute’s 2012 budget, fundraising, and strategy plans. Some of these documents were stolen from Heartland, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered.

The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.

Since then, the documents have been widely reposted on the Internet, again with no effort to confirm their authenticity.

One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.

We respectfully ask all activists, bloggers, and other journalists to immediately remove all of these documents and any quotations taken from them, especially the fake “climate strategy” memo and any quotations from the same, from their blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents. We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation. We ask them in particular to immediately remove these documents and all statements about them from the blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

How did this happen? The stolen documents were obtained by an unknown person who fraudulently assumed the identity of a Heartland board member and persuaded a staff member here to “re-send” board materials to a new email address. Identity theft and computer fraud are criminal offenses subject to imprisonment. We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes.

Apologies: The Heartland Institute apologizes to the donors whose identities were revealed by this theft. We promise anonymity to many of our donors, and we realize that the major reason these documents were stolen and faked was to make it more difficult for donors to support our work. We also apologize to Heartland staff, directors, and our allies in the fight to bring sound science to the global warming debate, who have had their privacy violated and their integrity impugned.

Lessons: Disagreement over the causes, consequences, and best policy responses to climate change runs deep. We understand that.

But honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.

Those persons who posted these documents and wrote about them before we had a chance to comment on their authenticity should be ashamed of their deeds, and their bad behavior should be taken into account when judging their credibility now and in the future.

Second note from WUWT:

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Notes on the faked Heartland document

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Anthony Watts

As a follow up to the post Notes on the Heartland Leak, I’ve prepared some notes on the PDF document “2012 Climate Strategy” that Heartland says in their press release is a fake among the other documents distributed. They say specifically that:

One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.

Here is a screencap of the top part of that document, which was printed, and then scanned, unlike any of the other documents which were direct to PDF from word processing programs:

There’s been a lot of scrutiny in comments on various blogs, and I’ve given some scrutiny to the document as well, comparing it with other documents in the set. I’m in agreement that this is a fake, here is why:

1. It is the only document in the set that appears to have been scanned rather than produced by a PDF document publisher such as Adobe Distiller 8.0 or 8.1 which were both in document properties on other documents. For example compare the two document properties side by side. I’ve placed arrows marking distinct differences:

2. The metadata in document properties in the document said to be faked have been sanitized. Why cover tracks? This could possibly be due to the leaker not knowing how to remove other metadata in standard PDF, but knows if he/she scans it on an Epson flatbed scanner and saves it to the scanner’s memory stick/flash drive port, there will be no personally identifiable information.

3. One of the first questions I asked Joe Bast of Heartland when I saw this printed then scanned document was “do you not shred your trash”? His response was, “there’s no need, all the communications are done electronically by email”. That suggests a paper copy never existed in the Heartland office. The fact that none of the documents contains any personal signatures lends credence to this.

4. It doesn’t read like a strategy document, as it mixes strategy with operational details and commentary.

5. It gets the operational details ( budget) wrong – especially the points about my project, rounding up to $90,000 from a very specific budget number of $88,000. This suggests trying to inflate the number for a purpose. There’s no evidence of rounding budget numbers in any other document in the set.

6. Key sentences are rather clumsily written and some make no sense. This contrasts with purposeful language in the other documents. This one sentence in particular has gotten a lot of attention:

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.

I can’t imagine pitching “…dissuading teachers from teaching science.” to a board of directors at a meeting. It is a sure recipe for a public relations nightmare.

7. There are punctuation errors throughout it, suggesting it is not a professional document. There’s an overuse of commas for example. The formatting is different than other documents in the set, with a left justified title. All other Heartland documents have a center justified title. Fonts for titles don’t match either. The “2012 Climate Strategy” document has a different font.

8. The ”2012 Climate Strategy” is the purported “smoking gun” that provides commentary and context missing from the other factual documents. Without this framing document, the other documents and what they contain, are rather bland. Without it, there’s not much red meat to dangle in front of people that would tear into it.

9. The document misrepresents the positions of Andrew Revkin and Dr. Judith Curry. This seems to come from a point of speculation, not from a point of certainty.

10. Most of the documents were prepared by Joe Bast, listed as author “jbast” in the PDF document metadata and done around 8AM on Monday, January 16th. One document, “Board Directory 01-18-12_0.pdf” has an author “ZMcElrath” ( a Heartland employee according to the Budget document) and was created on Wednesday January 25th at 1:04PM, within working hours just like all the others.

The document in question the ”2012 Climate Strategy” has a timestamp of Monday, Feb 13th, at 12:41PM, just one day before “DeSmog Blog” released the documents on their website. The timeline disparity doesn’t make a lot of sense for documents that were supposedly mailed to a person posing as a board member (according to an alleged email snippet on Keith Kloor’s website) to trick someone at Heartland to email them the package of documents. Here it is:

Dear Friends (15 of you):
In the interest of transparency, I think you should see these files from the Heartland Institute. Look especially at the 2012 fundraising and budget documents, the information about donors, and compare to the 2010 990 tax form. But other things might also interest or intrigue you. This is all I have. And this email account will be removed after I send.

It would have had to have been sent sometime between 12:41PM Chicago time on Monday Feb13th and Tuesday Feb 14th 16:39 (Pacific Time) when the first comment appeared on DeSmog Blogs first post on the issue. According to David Appell’s blog, Keith Kloor says it was sent yesterday (Feb 14th), which is after the creation date for the “2012 Climate Strategy” memo of “2/13/2012 12:41:52 PM. Which means DeSmog blog had the documents only a short time.

Appell also writes: Desmogblog Had Leaked Docs For Only an Hour

I guess I’m behind on this, because this afternoon Politico reported that Desmogblog received the documents yesterday (2/14) and “The blog posted them about an hour later without contacting the Heartland Institute for confirmation.”
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=5826D160-4705-4D72-A0BB-44C8C2EDA7DC
So they received them after the suspicious memo was scanned (according to its metadata). Which doesn’t prove its not fake, but at least the timeline isn’t inconsistent.

Appell also thinks the document makeup is suspicious and does his own metadata analysis.

Summary:

All the above evidence, plus Heartland’s statement saying it is a fake, taken in total suggest strongly that the “2012 Climate Strategy” document is a fake. From my perspective, it is almost if the person(s) looking at these said “we need more to get attention” and decided to create this document as the “red meat” needed to incite a response.

Indeed, the ploy worked, as there are now 216 instances (as of this writing) of this document title “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy” on Google at various news outlets and websites.

The question to ask then is this: who benefits the most from the existence of such a document? A disgruntled employee? Hardly. Such things often backfire. And, who would know best how to craft such a document for maximum public impact? I think the answers are there, but the question needs to be asked. From what I hear, Heartland is going for criminal prosecution and/or civil liabilities on this one. They certainly have a case.

All of those news outlets and bloggers that regurgitated this document and the claims in it without checking for the veracity of it first are going to have some defending to do to. The Guardian seems particularly vulnerable for their “publish first, ask questions later” tactic.

UPDATE: At Lucia’s Blackboard, commenter Duke C. have been delving into the faked memo. What he has found is quite interesting:

Duke C. (Comment #89877)
February 15th, 2012 at 9:55 pm

Steve McIntyre (Comment #89815)
February 15th, 2012 at 4:31 pm

If you look at the Document Properties of the various Heartland documents, the Confidential Memo has a date of Feb 13, 2012 whereas the other documents date from January. In addition, the agenda source (for example) refers to a p: drive and an origin in a *.wpd document, while the Confidential Memo does not have these features.

The Confidential Strategy Memo and the Form 990 were both scanned, possibly from the same source. There are similarities in the Metadata. Both were created under PDF Version 1.5, with the same Extensible Metadata Platform Core:

xmlns:x=”adobe:ns:meta/” x:xmptk=”Adobe XMP Core 5.2-c001 63.139439, 2010/09/27-13:37:26

The other 6 pdfs show a different core version:

xmlns:x=”adobe:ns:meta/” x:xmptk=”Adobe XMP Core 4.0-c316 44.253921, Sun Oct 01 2006 17:14:39

The Form 990 linked at DeSmog shows August 02, 2011 as the last modified date. The 990 linked at Heartlandinstitute.org shows December 06, 2011. Scanning artifacts indicate that both are identical.

All of this is, of course, circumstantial evidence. but I’m not ready to rule out that the Strategy memo wasn’t scanned at Heartland.

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Duke C. (Comment #89887)
February 15th, 2012 at 11:03 pm

			The Heartland Institute One South Wacker Drive #2740 Chicago, Illinois 60606 312/377-4000 map
Telephone			Phone: 312/377-4000 Fax: 312/377-5000
Other offices			1728 Connecticut Avenue NW #2B Washington, DC 20009 Phone: 202/525-5717 AdministratorP.O. Box 10330 Tallahassee, FL 32302 Christian R. Camara3900 Pearce Road Austin, TX 78730 Julie DrennerP.O. Box 361195 Columbus, Ohio 43236 Alan Smith

With tiny budgets like $310 million, $100 million, and $95 million respectively, how can lovable underdogs like Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and NRDC *ever* hope to compete with mighty Heartland’s $6.5 million?

With tiny budgets like $310 million, $100 million, and $95 million respectively, how can lovable underdogs like Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and NRDC ever hope to compete with mighty Heartland’s $6.5 million?