Keith Kloor is claiming that the Gleick/Heartland stolen documents incident is a new low in the climate wars. But is it?
Is tricking Heartland into sending some documents really any worse than hacking into a server at CRU and stealing a bunch of emails? I don’t think so.
Is tricking Heartland into sending some documents really worse than publicly and dishonestly defaming scientists?
Is tricking Heartland into sending some documents really worse than threats of violence to scientists and their families?
I could go on but I think the you get the point. This isn’t a new low, not even close. As George Bernard Shaw once said:
Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation
I must disagree. What Dr. Gleick has done severely damages the credibility of the entire climate change community. What does playing by the other side’s dirty rules do except no longer provide us with the high road?
When someone on “our side” does the wrong thing, the right thing to do is to swallow hard and call it what it is: wrong. As my parents always told me when I was a child, “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
Sorry, your parents were dead wrong. Two wrongs sometimes do make a right. Lying is in general a bad thing, but deception is still considered an integral part of war strategizing. I can cite specific examples, but I really don’t want to go there.
Gleick told a lie in order to ascertain — and expose — a truth. He didn’t tell a lie merely to ‘balance’ his opponents’ lies.
— frank
@ BarbD
Yes what Gleick did was wrong, as I have mentioned elsewhere.
My point here wasn’t to say otherwise, rather it was to point out that despite being wrong it certainly was not a new low.
@ frank “Gleick told a lie in order to ascertain — and expose — a truth.”
I imagine the CRU hacker (and those that promoted the emails) feel the same way.