The Gleick Earworm

1. The soundtrack to this post is "Can't Get It Out Of My Head" by the Electric Light Orchestra. The format will be a vomiting out of points as I think of them, numbered to bring some sort of order to the chaos. I expect to add more after publishing this post.

2. The title to this post was very nearly The Lying Will Continue Until Trust Improves, being a riff on this catch phrase, but since I do not think most of the people involved are consciously lying - though Gleick is - I decided against. AGW advocates better look out, though, because the widespread perception that some of them might be lying about global warming is going to be reinforced if a significant percentage of them continue to praise lying by Gleick.

3. Likewise the even more widespread perception that many of them might be credulous and deluded about global warming is going to be reinforced if a significant percentage of them continue to be credulous and deluded in public about very weak arguments in favour of the strategy memo being genuine.

Take the "evaluation" by DeSmogBlog that the memo was authentic. I have put scare quotes round "evaluation" because the word suggests it was done an impartial third party, but it is just the same guys as usually write the blog. It goes to a lot of trouble to show that the strategy memo "also uses phrases, language and, in many cases, whole sentences that were taken directly from Heartland's own material. Only someone who had previous access to all of that material could have prepared the Climate Strategy in its current form." - without seeming to realise that nothing in that contradicts the assertion that it is a fake.

To show that the reaction from AGW advocates was not always as unmindful of the future credibility of their side, read this blog post, The Cytokine Storm from a site called "lies.com". The author, John Callender, is a liberal in the US sense and is quite a strong, longstanding and well-known AGW blogger, so doubly opposed to most here, but no random bloke on the internet. His reaction to DeSmog blog's" evaluation" was,

Having studied the contents of the strategy memo, and the arguments for and against its authenticity, my reaction to DeMelle and Littlemore's argument was immediate and unequivocal: they're wrong, and obviously so. They must either be actively lying or passively bullshitting (that is, willfully disregarding the truth to assert a position they favor, without bothering about facts).

4. Let's jump back a step. My own position is that I think there is a severe and urgent danger to the world concerning global warming - namely the poverty and repression that will result from the measures that power grabbers and sincere crusaders put in to protect us against it. I am also somewhat concerned about global warming.

I think the current mainstream view of anthropogenic global warming is equivalent to a stock market bubble, with fear instead of optimism making it expand. The madness of crowds caused its "price" to become detached from underlying reality. I wish I'd bought shares in Imminent & Dreadful DoomCo. Ltd in 1995. I wish I'd then sold them in 2009. To say that they are massively overpriced, if falling, is not to say that they don't have some genuine underlying value.

5. This affair matters and the point within that matters most is the disputed memo. There are two sorts of lies concerned, lies about the way the world is and lies as a ruse of war. Gleick having lied as a ruse of war diminishes trust a bit; proof that he has lied about the way the world is will diminish it far more - because lies about way the world is are the sort of lies AGW advocates are suspected of telling.

6. Did you notice? Gleick is already known to have told one lie about the way the world is. He signed his email dump "Heartland Insider".

7. I agree with everything Megan McArdle said (and quoted from Stephen Mosher) about the reasons to suppose the memo is not genuine. There is one simple, psychologically plausible hypothesis that explains the existence this sloppily worded, unauthored, undated, untraceable-because-scanned memo containing wonderfully quotable lines that put the Heartland Institute in a very bad light, plus chunks of barely altered text from the other documents but scarcely anything else numerical about Heartland - and what there was erroneous, plus flattering mention of Gleick, plus a whiff of paranoia about the hated Koch brothers and Gleick's particular enemy in Forbes magazine, plus terms like "anti climate" that no actual AGW sceptic would use, plus Gleick's idiosyncratic punctuation. Gleick wrote it. He phished the rest of the package, saw it would be insufficiently appealing to journalists, and whipped up something that would. Think of the Danish Mohammed cartoons. They weren't quite enraging enough on their own, so provocateurs added a couple of fake ones too. People do such things.

8. You think he wouldn't do something so crazy and damaging to his career? Think about what he is already known to have done. And think also about the sad story of Orlando Figues professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, who still is a highly regarded historian. He rubbished his rivals' books on Amazon and praised his own, then, despite having signed the reviews "orlando-birkbeck", denied with legal threats ever having done so. Then he got his wife to say she'd done it. Then he confessed. People do such things. Well-regarded academics do such things.

9. As well as the simple, psychologically plausible hypothesis that explains everything stated in (7) there are other hypotheses that do explain the nature of the memo but are neither simple nor psychologically plausible: they centre round the idea of the poison pill. Some enemy of Gleick's, either at Heartland or a elsewhere (but highly involved with the AGW issue), plants a fake but not obviously fake memo with mention of him as a sop to his vanity and which pushes his buttons in other ways and is written in a sly copy of his style. The desired result presumably being that he would release it, be unable to prove it and get sued and/or discredited. Another possibility might be that the memo has accidental rather than deliberate errors and is designed to defame Heartland in exactly the way it did, but X would prefer to pass the risk onto Gleick.

Apart from the implausible necessity of positing two separate individuals willing to carry out a sting (Gleick's sting against Heartland plus X's sting against Gleick), all of these scenarios suffer from having the underpants gnomes as management consultants. When concocting these plots who could guess what Gleick might do? The plan involves delivering into Gleick's hands a physical object that might metaphorically or even literally have your fingerprints all over it. What if he hands the memo over to the cops for testing?

10. Why hasn't he handed the memo and the envelope over to the cops for testing? Why hasn't he sued Heartland for having accused him of something significantly worse than what he has confessed to? One factor that makes me believe Heartland is that they are pushing. They hesitated at first, consistent with some frantic phone calls along the lines of "none of you were idiot enough to write this, were you?" and then leapt in with open accusations and a call to the FBI. They do not seem scared of what the police might uncover. Gleick does.

11. Chris Cooper made me smile in his comments to my earlier post about the crowdsourcing exercise. He said, "like the dozens of commenters on Anthony Watts's post, I can't wait to see the results, and I can't wait for someone else to do the work." Hampered by ignorance of any computer related procedure I do not use daily, I did get as far as launching the program. But I couldn't get it to save. So having laboriously loaded up several samples of my own writing in order to train the program, I lost them all when I closed the computer. I might try again later. The first person to get a result was Shaun Otto, who claimed - happily given his opinions - that the most likely author was Joe Bast of the Heartland Institute. Here is a link to his Huffington Post blog post on the subject. (He also posted on his own blog, but this has more comments.) Greg Laden's was another similar result from an AGW advocate.

I was (honest, guv!) working out an objection for myself even before Sam Duncan said, "I don't think an automated analysis coming up with Bast as the likely author of the whole thing really tells us anything. Almost from the start the document has appeared to be genuine Heartland stuff interspersed with incriminating fakery. It's like scrawling "I think our masters in Moscow should see this - Harold W." over the minutes of a 1970s Labour Party conference: an egregious slur, but 99.9% genuine."

I have a question about this. If I were to select out all the parts of the strategy memo that seem to me most like Gleick's style and (assuming I can get it to work) put them into the program, has my act of selection for "being like Gleick" begged the question?

12. It was claimed by different groups that both Gleick's admission and Joe Bast's statement saying the strategy memo was a fake were subtly worded by sneaky legal brains so as to allow for them to conceal guilt without literally lying. I was unconvinced by either argument. Outside the more childish law dramas this just gets you laughed at. Look at the scorn heaped on Gordon Brown's attempt to claim that he had actually said, "no more Tory boom and bust". As if that would improve his credibility! I do not believe this sort of quibbling succeeds in law either - people sometimes do get off on technicalities but not that sort of technicality.

I'm tired and it just started being tomorrow, so that's me done for now.