Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Behind ‘Fakegate’

The centerpiece of Mr. Gleick’s counterfeit cornucopia was an alleged insider memo outlining plans to stop teachers from “teaching science,” and to “undermine” reports from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The memo also claimed the Charles G. Koch Foundation was funding Heartland’s climate-change efforts. None of this was true, but it didn’t stop Mr. Gleick from loading his “smoking gun.” Unfortunately for him, his ammunition turned out to be blanks. Computer forensic work showed that the memo couldn’t have come from any Heartland computers. It references only the documents that Mr. Gleick stole (a theft which he later was forced to admit). It also contains factual errors that no one at Heartland would have made. So why create this spectacularly inept forgery that has come to be known as “Fakegate”? It seems to be an obvious attempt to build a counterversion of “Climategate,” a genuine scandal that erupted when emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked in 2009 and 2011. They showed that certain scientists were manipulating data that didn’t support the left’s climate-change agenda and were blackballing scientists who refused to go along with that agenda. Climategate gave the radical environmental movement a well-deserved and very public black eye - and apparently, a thirst for revenge. Is “Fakegate” the extremists’ way of admitting that they cannot compete in the environmental debate on a level playing field? The polls aren’t going their way. Nor is the science. In the face of all this, has it just become too much work for them to engage in a fair fight over the facts? Considering that the odds of them winning a fair fight get longer every day, it appears that the answer is yes...more

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