Sunday, April 08, 2012

'Fakegate': Climate Change Fanatics Wage War on Dissenters

Why would Dr. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and chairman of an American Geophysical Union task force on "scientific ethics and integrity," break the law to engage in a smear campaign against a small think-tank called The Heartland Institute that resulted in "Fakegate"? As Alan Caruba related in the opening paragraph of his article published on Tuesday, April 3rd, titled "Fatetgate: The War on Science," "[g]enerations of Americans have been raised to venerate science and those who have enhanced and extended our lives through its application. The rise of environmentalism, however, has generated a war on science, first by distorting it, and then by propagandizing the 'findings', studies' and resulting claims based on them." The Heartland Institute, as a leading voice, led the effort to debunk the hoax through its sponsorship of six international conferences featuring scientists and others who presented papers demonstrating "that 0.038 percent of CO2 in the atmosphere had little or no "greenhouse" effect on the Earth's climate or weather events." Heartland's six International Conferences on Climate Change (ICCC) attracted scientists worldwide, who employed science rather than pseudo-science in their presentations. So it was, on January 27 of this year, that Peter Gleick stole the identity of a member of Heartland's board of directors and then used that identity to steal corporate documents describing Heartland's budget, fundraising plans, and more. When those documents failed to produce a "smoking gun" -- for example, they showed that Heartland received only small amounts of funding from the Koch brothers and from fossil fuel companies -- Gleick or an ally forged a memo alleging to describe Heartland's "Global Warning Strategy." On February 14, Gleick sent the stolen and forged documents to fifteen allies in the environmental movement and mainstream media, resulting in a wave of criticism of Heartland's supposed plans to "infiltrate schools" and "undermine" climate science. Gleick confessed to stealing the documents on February 20, but media coverage of the event focused overwhelmingly on the false claims in the fake memo rather than on Gleick's criminal actions. Gleick's allies immediately used the forged memo and stolen documents to target Heartland's donors and the scientists who have helped write its publications...more

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