1. It uses the term “anti-climate” to refer to Heartland’s own position — a derogatory term which neither Heartland nor any other climate skeptic outfit ever uses to describe their position.

2. It is written in the first person, yet there’s no indication of who wrote it. (Have you ever seen a memo like that?)

3. The PDF is time-stamped with a Pacific Standard Time timestamp: 2012-02-13T12:41:52-08:00 But Heartland is in Chicago (two timezones away), and none of its directors are in the Pacific time zone. Most are in Illinois, and none are in or even near the Pacific time zone.

So it appears likely that, as Heartland claims, the document really is a forgery, and a clumsy one, at that.

I can believe that someone at Heartland is going around clipping the content of other documents into some sort of a strategy memo. I find it harder to believe that they are rewriting those activities to make themselves sound more evil. Have you ever heard anyone describe themselves as “undermining” something? It’s a word that implies sneaking and underhanded behavior, which is why only bad movie villains usually apply it to their own activities.

Note also that whoever wrote the memo has hashed the math–they added in the $88,000 for internal resources twice. And they changed “scientists” to “writers”, which is not consistent with how these same people are described in the authenticated documents. It is, on the other hand, consistent with how climate activists view the kind of people who work for Heartland. Which makes it feel as if the paragraph had been written by someone who couldn’t quite bring themselves to deploy Heartland’s self-approving language.

Too sophisticated for the avg American though