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Did Peter Gleick write the FakeGate document?
- Bishop Hill blog - Whodunnit?
There's also some very interesting speculation about the identify of the culprit going on in the comments at Lucia's at the moment. Steven Mosher has noted the west-coast time stamp in the strategy document metadata and also some of the stylistic quirks of the author - poor punctuation, excessive use of parenthesis, and also the use of the strange term "anti-climate". Comparisons are being made with the literary style and twitterings of none other than Peter Gleick, the very green head of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California.
The Blackboard » Tell me what’s horrible about this.
[Steven Mosher comment] Looking at the small corpus of Gleick writings I would say that I see consistencies in misuse that are very telling. He writes himself into positions that he doesnt know how to punctuate. Hence the idiosyncratic use of parenthesis. he does this repeatedly.
Again, this is all just speculation. However, he’s been quiet. You’d expect him to tweet something over the last two days.. soo quiet..
The Blackboard » Tell me what’s horrible about this.
[Steven Mosher comment] its not the parenthetical comments, its the STYLE of using them
“Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow highprofile
climate scientists (such as Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own.”
that (such as) is weird and he does it twice.
The other thing is this. Gleick and taylor have been fighting.
Gleick and Curry, fighting. Now comes this bogus memo that turns gleick into a high profile climate scientist.
Worst of all, haertland doesnt like revkin, and here in this memo they seem to like him.
This paragraph is the smoking gun. But the gun is pointed at the foot of a guy in california. This is just an extension of his fight with taylor.
The Blackboard » Tell me what’s horrible about this.
The Blackboard » Tell me what’s horrible about this.
[Earlier comment by Steven Mosher] I have some speculation on the writer of the document.
1. West coast time zone.
2. trashes Curry and revkin, known adversaries
3. Uses a very strange word (anti-climate) in the document and in his tweets
4. uses parenthesis in a very odd way when he doesnt know how to punctuate sentences. in the document and in his letter to Pielke.
5. glorifies himself in the document.
6. prior history of making phony statements
Its not proof of course, just a speculation, kinda like Mann speculating that Steve mcIntyre had something to do with the leak. which nobody objected to.
The Blackboard » Tell me what’s horrible about this.
[earlier comment by Steven Mosher] ...But the thing that hit me first off was the mention of Gleick.
What I thought when I read his name was.. what the hell is his name doing in a strategy document? huh? makes no sense.
Then I thought.. hey arsonists often return to the scene of the crime.. is this his weird way of doing the same thing, metaphorically.. then I read the slam against revikin and curry.
Then I remember that he and curry had an issue… then the west coast time zone thing.
Posts
I’m warming (pun intended) to his Gleickness as suspect #1. Excellent bit of detective work there. Supporting data:
1. We know that Gleick is willing to deceive to support his noble cause, as evidenced by his fictionalized review of Donna’s book, which he clearly had not read, followed by his subsequent protestations to have read it.
2. He has a history of being bad at managing the deception and being rather tone deaf about how the real world will perceive (and see through) his deception.
3. As you mentioned, the faked document elevates Gleick himself as a high profile climate scientist. He’s not. Except maybe in his own mind. I’m chuckling at how that claim has to be annoying ‘the team’. Also, Forbes is elevated in stature, which happens to be where Gleick has recently started blogging.
4. The oddly tortured phraseology of ‘dissuading teachers from teaching science’ was, in my opinion, the farthest reach in the document. Interestingly, on Jan. 17th it was announced that Gleick has joined the board of NCSE, an organization that has increasingly conflated support for teaching evolution in schools with a new mission to support the teaching of global warming in schools. It’s clearly a top-of-mind hot button with Gleick. In joining a board as a new member, the whole concept of board packages and documents might also be top of mind.
5. Of course, your vocabulary and punctuation analysis is the most damning evidence. The PDF metadata is circumstantial but supporting. Taken as a whole, all these “multiple lines of independent evidence” raise the odds to “highly likely” (on the IPCC scale) that your suspicion is correct. Nicely done, sir.
In feeling the need to create the fake document and release it with the real ones, the FakeGater has confessed he didn’t think the real documents were damning. He felt it needed something more than was actually there. Otherwise, why take the substantial risk of ‘undermining’ the real documents with a fake? Particularly when there are so many supportive journalists willing to spin non-incriminating documents into a warmly smoking gun.