Renowned climate scientist comes under fire

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Reuters:

(Reuters) - The prestigious California-based Pacific Institute climate research group has launched an investigation of its president and founder, Peter Gleick, after he admitted fraudulently obtaining documents from global warming skeptics challenging his work.

The institute in Oakland revealed its inquiry into the widening controversy in a terse statement posted on Wednesday on its website, hours after the San Francisco Chronicle said it was discontinuing an online blog that Gleick had been writing for the newspaper.

"The Board of Directors of the Pacific Institute is deeply concerned and is actively reviewing information about the recent events involving its president ... and documents pertaining to the Heartland Institute," the board statement said.

Gleick himself went public about the matter on Monday with a statement confessing that he had posed as someone else to obtain internal memos from the Heartland Institute, a think tank that argues skeptic positions, among them that climate change is not caused by human activity and that health hazards from tobacco have been exaggerated.

"My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts - often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated - to attack climate science and scientists ... and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved," Gleick wrote in the statement, carried on the Huffington Post website.

Even before his mea culpa, Gleick, a renowned authority on global freshwater issues and winner of a MacArthur "genius" grant, had resigned last Thursday as chairman of the American Geophysical Union's Task Force on Scientific Ethics.

HARSH DEBATE

The scandal illustrates the increasingly harsh tone in the public and political debate over global warming, despite the consensus among mainstream scientists that rising levels of heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases, primarily caused by human activity, are altering the Earth's climate.

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Anything in defense of the Cult.

[clearvision]

This story is about as nasty as it gets. He is invited to debate at Heartland dinner, turns them down when they won't go public with their donor list (they explain why they don't anymore because of harassment). He then goes and impersonates a board member based on info from this exchange and gets board presentation with donor list, then goes ahead and releases it anonymously. There is also a faked two page document released, but he claims that is not him, others point to him. He is in big trouble.