Energy

Coveted ‘Carl Sagan’ Prize Goes To A Scientist Who Admitted To Conning A Conservative Think Tank

Youtube/Peter Gleick

Daily Caller News Foundation logo
Michael Bastasch DCNF Managing Editor
Font Size:
  • The Carl Sagan prize will be awarded to Pacific Institute President-emeritus Peter Gleick.
  • However, Gleick admitted he used “someone else’s name” to obtain confidential Heartland Institute documents.
  • Heartland’s spokesman said Gleick’s receiving the award “sullies the memory of Carl Sagan.”

A prominent California-based scientist will be awarded a prestigious science award Friday, despite the fact he admitted to obtaining confidential documents from a conservative think tank “under someone else’s name” before leaking them to reporters.

Pacific Institute President-emeritus Peter Gleick will receive the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization, named for the late science communicator and physicist Carl Sagan. Gleick will be presented with the prize at Wonderfest in San Francisco.

Chosen by a committee, the Sagan prize is awarded to Bay Area scientists who progress “the public understanding and appreciation of science.” The prize also comes with $5,000. (RELATED: University of California Sued Over Stonewalling Of ‘Climate Litigation’ Documents)

“Sagan would be proud to know that Peter Gleick, so renowned for his research and his outreach, has received Wonderfest’s Sagan Prize for 2018,” Wonderfest’s founding executive director Tucker Hiatt said in a statement issued in late August.

Gleick been a prolific author and outspoken proponent of policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Gleick is also a critic of skeptics of catastrophic global warming, whom he’s called “deniers.”

In fact, Gleick admitted in 2012 his hatred for those who disagree with him on climate science led to a “serious lapse of my own professional judgment and ethics.”

Gleick admitted in a 2012 Huffington Post blog post he used “someone else’s name” to extract confidential internal documents and sensitive donor information from the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank skeptical of man-made global warming.

Gleick then leaked those documents, including one that might have been fake, to reporters. At the time, Heartland kept its donors private, in part, because activists had harassed them in the past. Gleick did this while chairing the American Geophysical Union’s panel on “Scientific Ethics.”

“My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved,” Gleick wrote in 2012.

Gleick was a frequent critic of Heartland’s, routinely criticizing the group for not publicly disclosing its donors. Gleick posed as a Heartland Institute board member to extract internal funding documents from the group, the group’s spokeman says.

A former Heartland board member speculated Gleick was the source of the leaked documents three days before the renowned scientists admitted to it.

“Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected,” Gleick wrote.

The Heartland Institute bills itself as the most prominent think tank that promotes skepticism of man-made global warming. The group routinely releases reports to counter the mainstream climate science narrative put out by the United Nations.

“Wonderfest brings disgrace upon itself and sullies the memory of Carl Sagan by giving this award to an admitted liar and thief,” Heartland spokesman Jim Lakely told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Gleick’s actions, spurred by a possibly false document sent to him “anonymously,” allowed Greenpeace and other environmental groups to pressure Heartland Institute donors to withdraw their funding. GM and Diageo stopped funding Heartland amid pressure.

“Peter Gleick’s reward for impersonating a member of Heartland’s board of directors via email, stealing private documents, and writing a fake ‘memo’ to smear The Heartland Institute should have been a prison sentence,” Lakely said. “Instead, he is regularly celebrated by the radical environmental movement.”

Gleick’s admission earned him condemnation from across the ideological spectrum. Columnist Megan McArdle, then writing for The Atlantic, wrote at the time, “I confess to wondering whether he doesn’t have some sort of underlying medical condition that requires urgent treatment.”

Tim Huelskamp during the America First Energy Conference 2018 in New Orleans

Tim Huelskamp, President and CEO of the Heartland Institute onstage during the America First Energy Conference 2018 in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S., August 7, 2018. Picture taken August 7, 2018. REUTERS/Edmund D. Fountain.

A Washington Post writer bemoaned that Gleick has “done more to discredit himself and his work than he has to expose cynicism and collusion among global-warming deniers.”

Gleick resigned from AGU’s ethics board and also from the National Center for Science Education. However, Gleick was restored to his post as Pacific Institute president after a three-month investigation into his conduct.

Heartland Institute lawyers prepared a lengthy slideshow of evidence of Gleick’s fraud, including emails and document metadata, for federal prosecutors. The government did not prosecute Gleick.

Neither Wonderfest’s Hiatt nor Gleick responded to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

“I’m thrilled to be honored with the Sagan Prize,” Gleick said in a late August statement. “Carl Sagan’s early efforts to bring science challenges and solutions to the public and policy makers was an inspiration to me, and has encouraged a whole generation of scientists now willing to speak up on the critical challenges of our day.”

Update: Wonderfest founding executive director Tucker Hiatt gave the following statement to TheDCNF after press time.

In 2012, Peter Gleick had a lapse of judgment and (as described in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gleick as “Heartland Institute Incident”) dissembled to the anti-climate-change Heartland Institute, allowing an employee to believe he was a member of its board. <https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/science/earth/in-heartland-institute-leak-a-plan-to-discredit-climate-teaching.html?pagewanted=allGleick was attempting to confirm material previously sent anonymously to him that revealed planned Heartland Institute projects to mislead the public on issues of climate change, and even to engage in potentially illegal activity (supporting candidates for office). The information was important, but tarnished because it was confirmed through unethical means.
In this document  https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/heartland-institute-documents_b_1289669.html as well as in others, Gleick publicly has expressed sincere remorse for his ethical lapse. Since then, he has put his head down and continued to do good work on both the scientific and public fronts, and has continued to enjoy the respect of his peers in the scientific community as well as the appreciation of the public he has continued to enlighten.

Follow Michael on Facebook and Twitter

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel