“The people who said the earth was not flat were, basically, burned at the stake.”

James, your grasp of science appears to be matched by your grasp of history. Which is to say you have no grasp of either.

Ok, it was ‘witches’ (women), Muslims, Jews, and anyone the Catholic Church, and some other Chistian denominations, didn’t feel keen on, that were burned at the stake. You might have noticed Greg’s post on this recently. Heretics tortured, imprisoned, and murdered in hideous ways– by the high-minded, anti-science god-fearin’ men in robes who thought they were the enforcers of divine truth– these deaths likely numbered in the millions.

So, no it wasn’t the ‘flat-earthers’ that were burned at the stake; the flat-earthers who were hold outs on the whole notion that the earth was not a spheroid body, as late as the 1800’s. (And apparently 2014, if we count you James):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth

“English writer Samuel Rowbotham (1816–1885), writing under the pseudonym “Parallax,” produced a pamphlet called Zetetic Astronomy in 1849 arguing for a flat Earth and published results of many experiments that tested the curvatures of water over a long drainage ditch, followed by another called ‘The inconsistency of Modern Astronomy and its Opposition to the Scripture.’ One of his supporters, John Hampden, lost a bet to Alfred Russel Wallace in the famous Bedford Level Experiment, which attempted to prove it. In 1877 Hampden produced a book called “A New Manual of Biblical Cosmography”.

See James, the earth is not, um, actually flat. So if you’re saying it was unfair of those meanie sciency types to tell the flat-earthers that they were wrong, and so it’s also wrong for those meanie sciency types to tell anthropogenic climate change denialists, evolution denialists, ‘earth is more than 6000 years old’ denialists, that they are all simply wrong, then you are, in technical terms, addled in the brain-pan.

And scientists have not been in the habit of persecuting people, even when they hold ridiculously false beliefs; no James, that’s been the ultra-religious maniacs over countless centuries, when their fairy tales and delusions run smack up against basic reality, that have felt the need, and assumed the right, to murder people for simply asking questions. Scientists settle things with data and reasoned argument. Religious fanatics, of all stripes, scream, threaten, discriminate, enslave, demean and murder those that disagree. So it has been for millennia, so it is today.

James, you are an absurd little man.

3. The PDF is time-stamped with a Pacific Standard Time timestamp, even though Heartland is in Chicago, and none of its directors are in the Pacific Time Zone, nor even in a State adjacent to the Pacific Time Zone.

Additional detail (in later posts) now out now points to an explanation: that was the first document, which Gleick (based in Oakland, California) says he received via snail mail.

The strategy document was a fraud…

You might want to work on your reading comprehension. The link you provided does not assert that, let alone provide any solid evidence.

A massive fail for the always credulous CAGW faithful.

And this changes the scientific evidence…how exactly?

The broader tragedy is that his decision to go to such extremes in his fight with Heartland has greatly set back any prospects of the country having the â??rational public debateâ? that he wrote â?? correctly â?? is so desperately needed.

are revolting.

What peter did, actually, would get him a Pulitzer prize if he was a journalist.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/peter-gleick-admits-to-deception-in-obtaining-heartland-climate-files/

The strategy document was a fraud and Peter Gleick broke the law to steal the rest of the documents from Heartland. A massive fail for the always credulous CAGW faithful. As usual.

Come on, you know Anthony never censors or deletes polite comments from his blog. All his faithful followers tell us so!

/sarcasm