Climate Scientist Admits To Lying, Leaking Documents [View all]

[salvorhardin]

Peter Gleick is not just any scientist. He got his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley and won a MacArthur "genius" award. He is also an outspoken proponent of scientific evidence that humans are responsible for climate change.

And earlier this week, he confessed that he had lied to obtain internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a group that questions to what extent climate change is caused by humans.

...

But Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at the University of California, San Diego, says maybe that's not such a big deal. "The documents that were released last week essentially affirm what we already knew," she says. "And [the deception] was not necessary because this information is actually available through entirely appropriate means." In fact, Oreskes has documented ties between climate skeptics and their funders in her book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.

Oreskes says Gleick's actions don't diminish the validity of decades of climate research, nor do they reflect the ethics of scientists who do it. "Thousands and thousands of people are working on this issue, and this is one man," she says.

Full story + audio: http://www.npr.org/2012/02/22/147263862/climate-scientist-admits-to-lying-leaking-documents