Whose writing style most closely matches the Heartland memo [UPDATED]

Originally published on Feb 24, 2012 @ 2:44am

One of the early claims made accusing Peter Gleick of faking the Heartland memo (before he admitted to being the source of the other documents) had to do with his writing style. Supposedly it matched the writing style of the memo.

Anthony Watts even suggested people perform stylometry and textometry to see if Gleick really did write the memo.

Well Shawn Lawrence Otto decided to take Watts up on his suggestion and the results are likely not what people were expecting. It turns out that Heartland Institute president Joe Bast is the most likely source of the memo in question.

Results

Of the six author choices of: The Memo Itself, Peter Gleick 1 & 2, Joe Bast 1 & 2, and Heartland Staff, based on the above criteria, here are the scores JGAAP assigned for most likely authorship of the climate strategy memo under just a few of the many analyses the app can perform:

Heartland Strategy Memo.docx
Canonicizers: none

Analyzed by Nearest Neighbor Driver with metric Camberra Distance using Character 2Grams as events
1. Strategy Memo 0.0
2. Joe Bast 3.2756019350109358
3. Heartland Staff 5.861152017670673
4. Peter Gleick 7.631295386657848
5. Joe Bast 10.572152376359865
6. Peter Gleick 11.883756639524362

Analyzed by Nearest Neighbor Driver with metric Camberra Distance using Word 2Grams as events
1. Strategy Memo 0.0
2. Joe Bast 2.599109316906122
3. Heartland Staff 6.170704701235744
4. Joe Bast 9.570177815725275
5. Peter Gleick 13.307560177813828
6. Peter Gleick 13.695029284565496

Analyzed by Nearest Neighbor Driver with metric Camberra Distance using Word stems as events
1. Strategy Memo 0.0
2. Joe Bast 3.8820363096787065
3. Heartland Staff 7.695783407036921
4. Joe Bast 12.653793919968829
5. Peter Gleick 14.734167804512905
6. Peter Gleick 16.420190717794636

One possible flaw not considered in the above methodology is that the program could be attributing too close of an authorship match to Joe Bast and Heartland Staff because the strategy memo contains a sentence that also appears in the authentic Fundraising Plan: “Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective.”

I next crontrolled for this possibility by deleting the sentence in question from the climate strategy document, which I resaved as Climate Strategy Memo 2 (docx) and reran the same three analyses, using the original, full strategy document as one of the possible known authors, and got the following results:

Heartland Strategy Memo 2.docx

Canonicizers: none
Analyzed by Nearest Neighbor Driver with metric Camberra Distance using Character 2Grams as events
1. Strategy Memo 1.938705726184192
2. Joe Bast 2.9968217577188563
3. Heartland Staff 5.5472178990613275
4. Peter Gleick 8.156321472803725
5. Joe Bast 9.863690024204885
6. Peter Gleick 11.241849893833598

Analyzed by Nearest Neighbor Driver with metric Camberra Distance using Word 2Grams as events
1. Strategy Memo 4.183330096592706
2. Joe Bast 5.2640798702672384
3. Heartland Staff 7.577255315445771
4. Joe Bast 8.593442340043726
5. Peter Gleick 12.32193237311855
6. Peter Gleick 16.31481171381239

Analyzed by Nearest Neighbor Driver with metric Camberra Distance using Word stems as events
1. Strategy Memo 3.188360519110196
2. Joe Bast 4.783646657279247
3. Heartland Staff 9.110105530159261
4. Joe Bast 12.56463219477823
5. Peter Gleick 14.959700479974499
6. Peter Gleick 16.735394841607917

Conclusion

According to the above six analyses, which may contain unknown errors, the most likely author of the climate strategy memo is Heartland Institute president Joe Bast.

This isn’t exactly conclusive evidence, so it would be premature to point an accusatory finger at anyone. In fact since Heartland has good plausible deniability here they aren’t likely to admit anything. Which means we aren’t likely to be in any position to determine who actually wrote the memo. Unless we get some additional information.

But this does raise an interesting question. Why all the finger-pointing by Steve Mosher and others at Gleick before his admission, despite the fact that Bast’s writing style more closely matches the Heartland memo. What did they know that we didn’t?

UPDATE: Shawn Lawrence Otto is at it again, this time running his analysis with a helpful suggestion made by Heartland Institute president Joe Bast:

Efforts apparently are underway to use authorship analysis software to find the true author or authors of the memo. Since the memo contains so much material copied and pasted from, or paraphrases of, my own writing, such a comparison of the content and writing style of the forged memo and the stolen documents wouldn’t rule me out as a possible author of the memo. I hope persons conducting such analyses will use the text highlighted in the forged memo attached to this current essay, rather than the entire memo, so that their investigation is limited to the actual words of the forger rather than my own.

And the results still point to Joe Bast as the most likely author of the memo:

According to the above analyses by the JGAAP software, which as I caution above may contain unknown errors, and considering only the “forger’s” language not cut and pasted from other Heartland documents as identified by Heartland Institute president Joe Bast, the most likely author of the climate strategy memo is – still – Heartland Institute president Joe Bast.

Which leads me back to my earlier questions: how did Mosher and other Heartland-aligned climate denial bloggers know immediately and with such a high confidence that the whistleblower was Peter Gleick when as we see this is tricky stuff, and why is Joe Bast going to such great lengths to disavow the memo?

Note, I still maintain that I have no idea who wrote the memo. While the analysis done by Shawn Lawrence Otto are interesting, they are not conclusive enough for me to point an accusatory finger at anyone. But the questions this raises are interesting.