What I see from people claiming the document is authentic is quantitative textual analysis and line by line corroboration with other available documents.

It’s not really all that hard for me to decide who I lean toward. Statistics > intuition.

The ‘memo’, on the other hand, is basically correct, with details of payments, the schools stratergy and who is stumping up the cash. If you didn’t have the other documents, it would be pretty useful, but with the others, its laregely a precis.

Only a complete idiot (and I wish people at Heartland were this stupid) would send this out into the world. False flag operation, such as the work of 20 Committee from the Second World War, consist of sending the enemy information they already know, information which they don’t no but might be low grade or out of date, high grade stuff which is wrong (they changed the plans) or too late to do anything with (the invasion is happening now!).

If your going to make Glieck look an idiot with information you’ve fed him, you need it to look plausable, but then easily disproved. The problem with that plan is that the stuff you given him is true, and is provable.

Forgery by him makes even less sense. Not only are you guilding the lily (you’ve got all these other documents), but you manage to get the stuff about Koch wrong.

It was the Koch mistake that made me wonder. Its exactly the sort of snafu you make when your writing a draft of something without all the data in front of you – you kind of remember them giving you money 2010-11, but got the amount mixed up with how much you hope to get out of them this year. I reckon its a (slightly snipped) version of a draft document. Some of the language is a bit strange (anti-climate), because its just a draft. If it was written by someone outside the staff, or a version was passed out other parties for comments, then Heartland’s denials of it not being on their computers or by their current staff would be truish.

How did it get out? Someone mught have had an ephiany, or (more likely), someone has a grudge. Another document refers to the number of people who they had to let go, so it could be because the person who leaked it just got canned. And don’t forget that being a thinktank/PR/lobbiest is a business, and has competitors. If you wanted to knock someone out of the business, then this is not a bad way to do it.

I just wish that the media would look at the story, and not the shiny penny. Still, give it time…

I’d be really interested if you could expand a bit on why we should kill the ‘false flag’ theory. The objection you give here (that it would be something that Heartland wouldn’t do, because they want to stay under the radar) sounds problematic to me on at least one point: It assumes that the “false flag” operation would only have been conducted as an officially sanctioned action. A lot of people I’ve heard object to the “false flag” scenario seem to feel it’s prohibitively unlikely because it would require some big, complicated conspiracy at Heartland. But it doesn’t require that. All it requires is one person with the following three things:

* access to the internal Heartland documents.

* the skill required to successfully thread the needle between forging a document real-seeming enough to take in Gleick, but fake enough (and with enough Gleick “fingerprints”) to be credibly denounced and tied to Gleick if and when he tried to use it.

* the sketchy morals to conceive of and carry out such a plan.

Occam’s Razor would suggest that the Gleick-forged-it-himself explanation is simpler, and therefore preferred. I see the logic of that, and it’s definitely a factor in my thinking. But there’s also this (which you may have seen me mention before; if so I apologize for being repetitive): It’s in some ways simpler, to my mind, to imagine Gleick being successfully conned into mistakenly including the forged memo in the release in the belief that it was authentic, than it is for me to imagine Gleick being unable to predict that forging and including the fake memo along with the legitimate documents would both hand Heartland an easy way of taking the moral high ground (as has actually happened) and would be planting a glaring clue pointing to Gleick himself as the leaker.

I talk about this in more detail in a comment I posted to climatesight.

Basically, I feel like Gleick-as-forger requires us to think he was both surprisingly cunning (to come up with the entire plan, including forging the strategy memo) and surprisingly stupid (to fail to predict how the strategy memo’s inclusion would play out). Glieck-as-victim only requires us to think he acted naively and showed bad judgment under pressure.

Anyway, you’re probably right that I’m making this all too complicated. The truth, should it ever emerge, will probably be completely different (and in hindsight, more obvious) than anything I could think up.

You seem to be reading the memo as being ‘written by someone who either consciously or unconsciously made its language reflect the anti-denialist perspective’. Why? I suspect that people are starting to see what they want to see in the memo. Certainly nothing particularly stands out to me as having the style of an ‘anti-denialist’.

Ignore Megan McArdle. She has written four articles about the Heartland documents, and not one of them actually says anything about the documents. Its all about the ‘fake’, the leaker, and the various (amazingly complex) ways in which this could have come about. This is someone who is missing the real story (and engaged in a fair amount of projection and conjecture), in much the same way that bad whodunnits throw in so many red herrings – it deliberately confuses everyone and bumps up wordcount. The fact that she is so outraged that Glieck played a small trick to get the authentic paperwork, makes you wonder how much of a journalist she really is.

OK. so lets assume that Glieck forgered it. Pro bono? Glieck has although commited mailfraud (according to McArdle, so why forge a document when you’ve a load of perfectly good ones around? If it was a fake, then it hasn’t helped him.

Lets then ask if someone else faked it and sent it to him. It certainly had some stuff which is real, and even though the Koch claim is wrong (or possibly a garbled version of the fundraising memo), reading through the document doesn’t actually make you wonder all that much. The ‘anti climate’ phrase could simply have been short for ‘anti climate change’.

If someone did fake it, it seems likely they had access to original material, although they slightly botched some of the details. So is this a fake, or a slightly garbled version of a real document?

Lets kill the idea that its some sort of ‘false flag’ operation. Heartland is a PR/lobby shop, pretending to be a thinktank, pretending to be a charity. The first rule of a PR is not be the story, and a central rule of a lobbiest is to work under the radar. Your lobbying should be visible only to those that are important, and certainly don’t have it spoken about in the NYT. You will have problems with the IRS if certain aspects of the way you do business comes out, and your donors have no wish to be be identified with a campaign to fool schoolchildren, or have their names rleased to the public, especially if it reveals how casually you gave them out.

And why would you want to burn Watts, a man obviously so useful that your going to give him $88000 a year?

Scholars and Rogues have a very interesting article on the statements that Heartland have given out – they kind of say no, but the words are very evasive. There might be a reason for this.

All this reminds me of amatuer dectives looking at a real case, and bringing in all the baggage of reading Agatha Christie for thirty years. Real police don’t work like Inspector Morse. They tend to go for the obvious and logical, because it usually is the obvious and logical.

Stop making real lfe so complicated. Don’t try to fit everything into some grand plan, and apply Occums Razor. Ignore the memo if you want, just look at the other stuff.

I wish McArdle and others would…

Or it could be that it was put there by someone else who was targeting Gleick, and wanted the document to both 1) be more appealing to Gleick as constituting a powerful smoking gun of Heartland evil, and 2) be more easily portrayed as a forgery produced by Gleick, should Gleick release it.

Under any scenario, we’re necessarily dealing with people who are lying, and trying to manipulate public perception to support a false narrative. Given that, I think it’s important to be skeptical, and not try to shoehorn the evidence into supporting any particular a priori theory.

It works equally well being written by someone who believes that “science” is frequently corrupted and manipulated and driven towards pre-determined “outcomes” by (the “other side’s”) political beliefs and/or sociological forces – and hence “truth” is not generally found in “science” per se.

See if you can find surveys of Young Earth Creationists and Intelligent Design advocates on their attitudes to “science”.

“His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain â?? two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.”

This is written by someone who believes that “science” is official truth. Obviously people in the Heartland institute believe that science is not whatever truth is officially proclaimed at the official truth, but rather knowledge produced by the scientific method, and that when teachers teach global warming, they are teaching not science, but Gaia worship.