It looks as if the global warming scammer who hoped to concoct a reverse Climategate may have been identified:
FEBRUARY 20, 2012: Earlier this evening, Peter Gleick, a prominent figure in the global warming movement, confessed to stealing electronic documents from The Heartland Institute in an attempt to discredit and embarrass a group that disagrees with his views.
Gleick’s crime was a serious one. The documents he admits stealing contained personal information about Heartland staff members, donors, and allies, the release of which has violated their privacy and endangered their personal safety.
An additional document Gleick represented as coming from The Heartland Institute, a forged memo purporting to set out our strategies on global warming, has been extensively cited by newspapers and in news releases and articles posted on Web sites and blogs around the world. It has caused major and permanent damage to the reputations of The Heartland Institute and many of the scientists, policy experts, and organizations we work with.
A mere apology is not enough to undo the damage.
In his statement, Gleick claims he committed this crime because he believed The Heartland Institute was preventing a “rational debate” from taking place over global warming. This is unbelievable. Heartland has repeatedly asked for real debate on this important topic. Gleick himself was specifically invited to attend a Heartland event to debate global warming just days before he stole the documents. He turned down the invitation.
Gleick also claims he did not write the forged memo, but only stole the documents to confirm the content of the memo he received from an anonymous source. This too is unbelievable. Many independent commentators already have concluded the memo was most likely written by Gleick.
We hope Gleick will make a more complete confession in the next few days.
There are several interesting things about this action and subsequent confession, which it appears may soon be followed by further confessions. They are as follows:
1. Contra their feverish insistence that the Climategate emails didn’t reveal anything significant or do any serious harm to their cause, it’s obvious that the global warming scammers believe that they did. Hence the document theft and release.
2. The stolen Heartland documents that were released didn’t actually do any harm to the anti-AGW cause or it would have been unnecessary to forge any documents.
3. The global warming scammers understand that they have failed to convince enough people that the scientific consensus is settled. In fact, they’ve now reached the point that so many people reject these assertions that they’re doing damage to the credibility of science and scientists by association. This is why Gleick is, as the Heartland press release correctly points out, ludicrously trying to claim that it is HEARTLAND that is attempting to stifle “rational debate”.
4. They’re getting seriously desperate. Which makes sense. In times of severe economic contraction, there will be significant pressure to stop funding all science that isn’t of immediate practical benefit, to say nothing of obvious junk science like what passes for climate science.
The consequence of this is that more scientists – who are herd animals, after all – are going to find that they cannot participate in the scam any longer. We’ll know that it’s over when clueless science fetishists like PZ Myers belatedly admit that because there isn’t any global warming, Man isn’t causing it and the science that they claimed was definitively settled never existed in the first place.