You know, I don’t respond to a lot of the climate science news right now. Partly, I’ve been distracted by other things, but mostly it’s because I just don’t have anything new to say. Show 130 years of data that says the Sierra Nevada snowpack isn’t actually declining? Show that the supposed disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers in 2035 (based on a typo, as first reported here at PJM) isn’t happening?
Yeah, its kind of what I expect: the warming crisis “consensus”, always supported with questionable models and piss-poor statistics, is collapsing.
This time, however, we’ve got something new and different. Starting with the warmenista DeSmogBlog, the popular story this week has been that a Heartland Institute (insert Phantom of the Opera music, pictures of bats, and a reference to the Koch Brothers) “whistleblower” had revealed “Heartland Institute’s budget, fundraising plan, its Climate Strategy for 2012 and sundry other documents (all attached) that prove all of the worst allegations that have been levelled against the organization.”
The only problem? The closest to a “smoking gun” was forged.
Apparently, someone still smarting about Climategate decided if they didn’t have a counter-Climategate, they’d make one up.
Now, what’s interesting if you look at the first post is that about a half-dozen other warmenista blogs all posted about this at very nearly the same time. Interested observers will note that it took most of November 18th 2009 for the Climategate story to get even around the climate-skeptic blogs. (We at PJM were the first US source to break the story in a major-market blog, and would have been first in the world except we lost our nerve until the BBC had it too.)
It’s almost as if it were co-ordinated.
We’ve asked Heartland for an article on this for PJM. In the mean time, see Anthony Watts’ blog Watts Up With That for all the details.
Update
megan McArdle at the Atlantic doesn’t buy it either. “Fake but Accurate” anyone?
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