Climate Audit

Lynn Truss‘ book on punctuation “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” received astonishing coverge.

The title of the book is based on the following joke:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons. ‘Why?’ asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. ‘Well, I’m a panda,’ he says, at the door. ‘Read the manual.’ The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

‘Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.’

Had the manual been written by Peter Gleick, the manual would have read “eats, shoots, and leaves”.

Mosher noticed the distinctive comma punctuation of the forged memo once he started looking at the memo for “high-entropy” characteristics and reported this finding in his first comment at Lucia’s, which fingered Gleick as the author of the forged memo. In the critical paragraph of the forged Confidential Memo, there are no fewer than three distinct examples of Gleickian commas:

through his Forbes blog and related high profile outlets, our conferences, and through coordination with external networks

other groups capable of rapidly mobilizing responses to new scientific findings, news stories, or unfavorable blog posts

the more extreme AGW communicators such as Romm, Trenberth, and Hansen

Parallels were then sought in Gleick’s unedited comments and didn’t take long to find. His review of Donna Laframboise had been derided at Judy Curry’s because it showed no evidence that Gleick had actually read the book. But no one commented on Gleick’s comma punctuation in that review, which was observed to match the forged memo. Here are a few examples:

Lies, misrepresentations, and a bible for climate change deniers

lies, misrepresentations, and falsehoods

those who hate science, fear science, or are afraid that if climate change is real

Maybe Gleick will get mentioned in the next edition of “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”.

Andrew Lacis of GISS has an extraordinary comment at Judy Curry’s that prompted today’s post. Lacis classified Gleick’s conduct as merely a “political prank”. Unfortunately for Gleick, the issue is not what Lacis thinks, but whether his admitted acts (leaving the fake memo aside for now) meet all the elements of 18 USC 1343 (wire fraud), a serious federal offence. Given Gleick’s admissions, the only legal point that even requires analysis is whether his actions deprived Heartland of “property” under binding interpretations of 18 USC 1343. There is a case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court that is exactly on point to this question: it held that confidentiality and exclusive use of business information were a form of property rights, the deprivation of which using false pretences was an offence under 18 USC 1343. This decision is binding on lower courts. All the elements of 18 USC 1343 appear to met under admitted facts.
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