Robert Tracinski offers thoughts on the bungled, and pathetically stupid, smear that Peter Gleick aimed at the Heartland Institute.
Fakegate shows us, with the precision of a scientific experiment, several key truths about the global warming movement. It shows that most warmists, both the scientists and the journalists, will embrace any claim that seems to bolster their cause, without bothering to check the facts or subject them to rigorous investigation. (Anthony Watts notes how few journalists bothered to contact him before reporting the claims about him that are made in the fake memo.) And it shows us that warmists like Gleick have no compunction about falsifying information to promote their agenda, and that many other warmists are willing to serve as accomplices after the fact, excusing Gleick's fraud on the grounds that he was acting in a "noble cause." It shows us that "hide the decline" dishonesty is a deeply ingrained part of the corporate culture of the global warming movement.
Gleick wasn't just an obscure, rogue operator in the climate debate. Before his exposure, his stock in trade was lecturing on "scientific integrity," and until a few days ago he was the chairman of the American Geophysical Union's Task Force on Scientific Ethics.
Gleick's frame up failed spectacularly when he apparently threw in the faked Heartland Institute internal memo. The document, supposedly a confidential strategy memo, was ludicrously error laden.
Isn't this the frosting on the cake? Gleick routinely lectured everybody else about ethics. But it's not just the global warming crowd that suffers from these ethical lapses. It's a progressive trait. Progressives invariably argue that their crisis du jour is so severe and their cause is such a moral imperative that anything they do, anything at all, that advances their cause is justified. There might even be some of them who believe it. At least for a while. But mostly they're lying about it, even if it's only to themselves.
Global warming, health care reform, income inequality; these are all contrived crises whose solutions are invariably designed to entrench progressives and enhance their power. Global warming in particular was intended to be the motherlode. A Carbon Market was supposed to provide an exchange for the trading of Carbon Credits. Companies and individuals could purchase indulgences to offset their contributions to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. The money would fund research and green projects. Global Climate Change treaties would impose all manner of taxes and fines and of course wealth transfers from richer nations to poorer nations. Naturally there would be legions of progressives doing the research, running the projects, and overseeing the whole thing. Naturally they would be compensated for it.
Richly compensated. Climate study grants already run in the millions. When you get to the bottom of these ethical lapses it's about the money. It's about progressive job security and the preferred progressive strategy of leveraging coercive government power as the way to get rich. It turns out we're all capitalists at heart. Even if you business is the destruction of capitalism.
