Megan McArdle on Peter Gleick Confession & The Damage Done

I hardly know what to say about the latest developments in the Heartland document dump. Profanity seems too weak, and incredulity too tame.

To recap for those who weren’t following along at home, last week, someone emailed a bunch of climate bloggers documents that purportedly came from the Heartland Institute, a think tank which has been active in promoting skepticism about global warming:

Dear Friends (15 of you):

In the interest of transparency, I think you should see these files from the Heartland Institute. Look especially at the 2012 fundraising and budget documents, the information about donors, and compare to the 2010 990 tax form. But other things might also interest or intrigue you. This is all I have. And this email account will be removed after I send.

Chortling and glee followed as the climate bloggers pored over the documents and posted exerpts, mostly from a “Climate Strategy” memo which had a rather damning way with words.

24 hours after the document dump, Heartland confirmed that someone had basically phished them–talked a support staffer into sending documents from a recent board meeting to the “new email” of a board member. Except . . . Heartland denied that the “strategy memo” was theirs. And after reading through it–and the documents–carefully, I was inclined to believe them; the text was all wrong, and while the other documents had been printed to PDF sometime in January, this one had been scanned into a computer less than one day before it was sent to the climate bloggers. While some journalists argued that all the checkable facts in the memos were backed up by the other documents that Heartland admitted to sending, to me, that merely suggested that it was written by someone who had those documents in their possession.

But not a full understanding of those documents, because the memo made curious errors. Most notably, it claimed that the Koch foundation had given $200,000 in 2011, when the actual number was $25,000 ($200,000 is what Heartland’s fundraising document indicates they hoped to get in 2012)–and since that money was donated for Health Care News, Heartland’s health care newsletter, it’s hard to see why it would show up in the climate strategy document, rather than, say, a document about their health care strategy.

…Nonetheless, the case was not strong enough for me to blog about it; in the second post I wrote, I listed my own criteria for figuring out who had written the memos, but they were pretty general, and I was not confident that they’d lead anywhere. Others were not quite so circumspect. Roger Pielke Jr, a climate political scientist enviropolicy wonk who is probably less interventionist than the average of his peers, but less so than the average of the American public, tweeted,

Whodunnit? Is Gleick the Heartland faker? This guy thinks so uses my blog as evidence.

and then

I emailed @PeterGleick to ask if he faked the Heartland document, no reply yet. I offered to publish his confirmation or denial on my blog.

And Ross Kaminsky, a senior fellow at Heartland, virtually came right out and accused him at the American Spectator. However, given Heartland’s scorched earth tactics, which have involved not-really-veiled threats of civil and criminal actions against anyone who reacted critically to the document dump, I was inclined to reserve judgement.

Then yesterday night, Peter Gleick went and confessed. To the phishing, but not the faking:

…This is . . . just . . . words fail me . . . I mean, seriously . . . um . . . well, what the hey?!?!

The very, very best thing that one can say about this is that this would be an absolutely astonishing lapse of judgement for someone in their mid-twenties, and is truly flabbergasting coming from a research institute head in his mid-fifties. Let’s walk through the thought process:

You receive an anonymous memo in the mail purporting to be the secret climate strategy of the Heartland Institute. It is not printed on Heartland Institute letterhead, has no information identifying the supposed author or audience, contains weird locutions more typical of Heartland’s opponents than of climate skeptics, and appears to have been written in a somewhat slapdash fashion. Do you:

A. Throw it in the trash

B. Reach out to like-minded friends to see how you might go about confirming its provenance

C. Tell no one, but risk a wire-fraud conviction, the destruction of your career, and a serious PR blow to your movement by impersonating a Heartland board member in order to obtain confidential documents.

As a journalist, I am in fact the semi-frequent recipient of documents promising amazing scoops, and depending on the circumstances, my answer is always “A” or “B”, never “C”.

It’s a gross violation of journalistic ethics, though perhaps Gleick would argue that he’s not a journalist–and in truth, it’s hard to feel too sorry for Heartland, given how gleefully they embraced the ClimateGate leaks. So leave ethics aside: wasn’t he worried that impersonating board members in order to obtain confidential material might be, I don’t know, illegal? Forget about the morality of it: the risk is all out of proportion to the possible reward.

Some of the climate bloggers are praising Gleick for coming forward, and complaining that this is distracting from the real story. And I agree that it’s a pity that this is distracting from the important question about how fast the climate is warming, and what we should do about it.

But that is not the fault of Heartland, or the people who are writing about it. When a respected public figure says that a couple of intriguing pieces of paper mailed to him by a stranger somehow induced him to assume someone else’s identity and flirt with wire fraud . . . well, that’s a little distracting.

Gleick has done enormous damage to his cause and his own reputation, and it’s no good to say that people shouldn’t be focusing on it. If his judgement is this bad, how is his judgement on matters of science? For that matter, what about the judgement of all the others in the movement who apparently see nothing worth dwelling on in his actions?

When skeptics complain that global warming activists are apparently willing to go to any lengths–including lying–to advance their worldview, I’d say one of the movement’s top priorities should be not proving them right. And if one rogue member of the community does something crazy that provides such proof, I’d say it is crucial that the other members of the community say “Oh, how horrible, this is so far beyond the pale that I cannot imagine how this ever could have happened!” and not, “Well, he’s apologized and I really think it’s pretty crude and opportunistic to make a fuss about something that’s so unimportant in the grand scheme of things.”

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More:

E&E Publishing now considers Peter Gleick a thief not a “warrior.”

In a report on “Deniergate” earlier today, E&E Publishing’s Greenwire ran the following headline:

Scientist who leaked Heartland documents is a well-known political warrior.

But E&E Publishing’s late-afternoon publication E&E News PM changed the headline to:

Scientist resigns leadership posts after stealing, leaking documents.