"People with sound science on their side do not need to forge documents to validate their arguments or make the other side look bad."James Taylor, contributing journo at Forbes. Not only did Gleick commit identity fraud, but somebody (either Gleick himself or someone else) apparently forged documents to try to make the Left's cartoon picture ("Big Oil funded right-wing think tanks") fit the face of the Heartland Institute.
When AGW activists try to claim an equivalence between this case and the "hacking" of emails and data from the University of East Anglia's CRU, they can be knocked back on two points:
First, the "Fakegate" affair is so named because a certain document alleged to have come from Heartland was actually a forgery. In the case of the two Climategate releases, the emails and data were genuine.
Second, where Gleick committed identify fraud in order to obtain other documents from Heartland, nobody yet knows how the CRU emails and data were obtained (there are myriad possibilities due to the complicated nature of modern data storage systems).
So... no equivalence. And no mercy, either: you people richly deserve all the discredit you can get. Except for the league of mental short-arses on Twit-er; you lot weren't even capable of drawing the question marks to begin with.
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For the record: the Tapei Times' only coverage of this story has been an AFP piece in which Gleick's identity fraud is referred to as a "crime" in inverted commas (but of course!), and in which there is no mention either of the details or of the forged nature of the "2012 Climate Strategy" document.
Something I read at the linked Bishop Hill post has lodged itself in my mind and begun to fester. It’s this jaw-dropping admission from Bora Zivkovic, the “blogs editor” at Scientific American, concerning the best methods for. . . winning hearts and minds, I guess, in what clearly rank for him as climate-change wars:
ReplyDelete“Educating people does not work, it assumes the 'deficit model'. Exposing shennanigans, sources of money, finding hypocrysy - that may work.”
That’s just a hell of a thing for an editor at Scientific American to say.
If you read a bit about this “deficit model,” as I had to do, you’ll see that Zivkovic’s (Scientific American’s?) concern is not that people can’t learn scientific facts and theories, but rather that when they acquire the pertinent information, they still may fail to fall in line with what “concerned scientists” advocate in the way of public policy. Therefore Zivkovic - and those of his colleagues who would rather simply cow a compliant populace than conduct or report science - prefer to “engage” rather than to educate, to emphasize “common values” rather than information. Or, to judge by Zivkovic’s tweeted recommendations, to fling poo rather than find and spread truth. Whatever works, when education “does not.”
Way to go, Scientific American!
Yes... you know I always think back to that stained glass window the Fabians had made. It shows two men striking an image of the world with hammers - again and again and again.
ReplyDeleteThat's the Left; their committment to State coercion can be disguised (hence the wolf in sheep's clothing), but it is as unshakeable as Orwell's boot-on-human-face-forever image.