Rconnor, let me respond to your implications regarding what you think I said (I didn't judge the methods one way or another, but it appears this is a standard response) with this quote:
Even more pathetic is the sanctimonious open letter by Michael Mann and six colleagues who suggest that Heartland merely got its comeuppance for cheering and publicizing the release of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) emails that sparked the Climategate scandal.
I think this question is
answered by the Heartlands institute president explicitly enough.
1) The Hadley centre is a publicly funded organisation which was evading FOI requests and actively suppressing dissenters.
The Heartland Institute is not a publicly funded company and not required to release any information whether under FOI or not.
2) Climategate released a tranche of
genuine documents that should have been released under legitimate FOI requests.
It is not yet established if they were hacked from an outside source or whether an insider released the information.
It seems Dr Gliek didn't find what he wanted and the so called “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy.” provides some clues to
his being the author . Not just identified but readily recognised and called on it. I'm sure you are aware of FBI programs that will confirm this. Or not as the case may be. Seems rather an amateurish fake to me. There are other clues in other blogs such as Dr Gliek being named in the memo but not the usual suspects. (Vanity?)
3) We have no idea of the credentials of the Climategate hacker.
Dr Peter Gliek is/was chairman of the
AGU Task Force on Scientific Ethics
Somehow, his behaviour is inconsistent with that position.
(Incidentaly, he is one of the signatories
here.)
Gleick and his co-author Randy Townsend of the AGU wrote that advancing scientific work to create a sustainable future would only be possible if scientists had the trust of the public and policymakers. And that trust, they added, "is earned by maintaining the highest standards of scientific integrity in all that we do."
(my emphasis).
4) The response of the "Deniers" to climategate was extreme caution until they had validated the authenticity of the material released.
The response of the AGW community and its websites was quite the converse.
So yes there are parallels but not the ones you would like.
Both show the extent to which the AGW camp is corrupted.
But I am not offended by the implications that I somehow have dual standards. This is exactly the attack made on Heartlands by the AGW camp and defended by them.
What we now look to see is how the new Chair of the AGU Task Force on Scientific Ethics deals with the behaviour of its former chair.
In point of fact they should perhaps be as harsh as most courts are on corrupt policemen, school teachers who have liasons with students etc. In other words they have abused their position of responsibility.
An article in TIME Science has Gliek admitting how he obtained the various documents which is condemned even without considering if he forged the memo or not.
JMW
