What a twin reversal of fortune. While the Heartland Institute has melted down because of its overreaction to climate scientist Peter Gleick’s release of their funding documents, Gleick himself has now been reinstated as president of the Pacific Institute following an independent investigation.

On May 21, the UK Guardian broke the news that an external investigation conducted for the Institute cleared Gleick of the charge of faking material in his elaborate effort to obtain internal Heartland strategy and finance documents.

Today, the Institute released this short statement from the Institute’s Board of Directors:

The Pacific Institute is pleased to welcome Dr. Peter Gleick back to his position as president of the Institute. An independent review conducted by outside counsel on behalf of the Institute has supported what Dr. Gleick has stated publicly regarding his interaction with the Heartland Institute. This independent investigation has further confirmed and the Pacific Institute is satisfied that none of its staff knew of or was involved in any way.

Dr. Gleick has apologized publicly for his actions, which are not condoned by the Pacific Institute and run counter to the Institute’s policies and standard of ethics over its 25-year history. The Board of Directors accepts Dr. Gleick’s apology for his lapse in judgment. We look forward to his continuing in the Pacific Institute’s ongoing and vital mission to advance environmental protection, economic development, and social equity.

“I am glad to be back and thank everyone for continuing their important work at the Pacific Institute during my absence,” said Dr. Gleick in a statement. “I am returning with a renewed focus and dedication to the science and research that remain at the core of the Pacific Institute’s mission.”

I immediately called up the media contact at the Institute provided with the statement, Nancy Ross. She said that that statement represents the full extent of everything the Institute plans to release on this matter. As of now, the Institute is not going to release the independent review.

The May Guardian story provided this background:

Gleick’s sting on Heartland brought unwelcome scrutiny to the organisation’s efforts to block action on climate change, and prompted a walk-out of corporate donors that has created uncertainty about its financial future.

Gleick, founder of the Pacific Institute and a well-regarded water expert, admitted and apologised for using deception to obtain internal Heartland documents last February.

He has been on leave from the institute pending an external investigation into the unauthorised release of the documents, although it is not entirely clear what the investigation entailed. That investigation is now complete, and the conclusions will be made public.

For those who don’t remember the history, I’d suggest Greg Laden’s post, “An important revelation regarding Heartland Gate.” See also my February post “Crossing the Line as Civilization Implodes.”

Anyone familiar with the facts of the matter cannot be surprised by the outside counsel’s finding. It does raise the question of who created the strategy memo. I’m not sure we will ever find out the answer to that question.

All we know for sure is that the senior leadership of Heartland 1) is capable of the most outrageous and offensive falsehoods and 2) has such catastrophically bad judgment that they continued to push those falsehoods for weeks after being widely denounced, even by their own (former) supporters:

• Heartland Institute Compares Climate Science Believers And Reporters To Mass ‘Murderers And Madmen’
• Heartland’s Board Backs Campaign To Smear Climate Science Believers, Even As Eleven Companies Drop Support

by Matt Kasper

At a House hearing last week, witnesses were intending to focus on coal mining. Instead, a photo of a five year old child is getting all the attention.

Testifying in front of the House Natural Resources Commitee on the impact of coal mining, activist Maria Gunnoe intended to show a picture of a five year old child bathing in polluted water from mountaintop mining. But House Republicans censored the image, calling it child pornography.

The photo was taken by photojournalist Katie Falkenberg, who wrote this caption about the image:

Erica and Rully must bathe their daughter, age 5, in contaminated water that is the color of tea. Their water has been tested and contains high levels of arsenic…. The coal company that mines the land around their home has never admitted to causing this problem, but they do supply the family with bottled water for drinking and cooking. Contaminated and colored water has occurred in other coalfield communities as well where mountaintop mining is practiced.

Members of the committee were not able to see the informative image, because Republican committee staff barred Gunnoe from displaying the picture during her testimony.

Gunnoe complied with the request, but after the hearing was escorted into an empty room by Capitol Police and was questioned for 45 minutes about the photo at the request of an unnamed GOP senior committee staffer to Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO). Gunnoe is a renowned activist against mountaintop coal mining, who has testified before the committee three other times.

Intimidation tactics against coal activists are nothing new, especially against Gunnoe. She has faced threats and intimidation directed at her and her family for her environmental justice work:

In return for her passionate activism, mine managers have singled out Gunnoe as an enemy of mine workers and their jobs. She has received threats on her life and her children are frequently harassed at school. Her daughter’s dog was shot dead, wanted posters featuring her photo have appeared in local stores, and she has had to take serious measures to protect her family and property.

It is not difficult to see why the Goldman Environmental Prize winner is seen as a threat. As Gunnoe pointed out in her testimony about the Spruce coal mines in West Virginia, mountaintop removal is an extraordinarily destructive process that the coal companies don’t want the public to know about:

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by Rebecca Lefton

In a visit to Sweden this week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for greater international cooperation to address climate change.

“We do need more action in the fight against climate change. We need real-world solutions and we need results,” said Clinton in a meeting with environmental officials.

Secretary Clinton and Sweden’s Minister for the Environment, Lena Ek, announced the launch of a global awareness campaign as part of the Clean Air and Climate Coalition to spread information about the potential for cost-effective solutions to combat short-lived climate pollutants (slcp’s).  Short-lived climate pollutants — such as black carbon, soot, methane, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and tropospheric ozone — are shorter lived than carbon dioxide, but much more potent. They contribute to more than 30 percent of current global warming and limiting them can significantly reduce temperatures.

Many of the solutions to avoid SLCP’s already exist but are not being utilized. The coalition is working with industry to share solutions and spread information on the benefits of action. Addressing the problem isn’t just good for climate — it’s good for human health. Action to reduce slcp emissions can save 2.5 million lives a year by improving air quality, and increase crop yields by 30 to 135 million metric tons by 2030.

Minister Ek pointed out that there are also important social benefits, as solutions for global warming also offer opportunities to promote gender equality and women’s rights.

The Clean Air and Climate Coalition was launched in February, 2012.  The Coalition got a boost last month when G8 members joined at Camp David, bringing the membership to 16 countries plus the European Commission, United Nations Environment Program, and the World Bank.

Both Clinton and Ek affirmed commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But Clinton said these ongoing (and complicated) efforts should not prevent action now to reduce slcp’s.

“While we continue to work on bringing down carbon dioxide emissions and finalizing an international agreement, let’s also deliver a blow to methane, black carbon, and HFCs. We are poised to do both, and we should,” said Clinton.

At the upcoming Rio +20 UN Earth Summit, the coalition will announce plans to engage with oil and gas companies to cut methane through waste-reduction partnerships with cities.

Rebecca Lefton is a Policy Analyst with the International Policy Team at the Center for American Progress.

by Max Frankel

Since its inception in the mid 1800′s, the sport of baseball has grown and evolved, both in its popularity and in the way the game is played.

Through the decades, new types of pitches have been developed, different varieties of wood bats have been used, the height of the mound has been altered, and the average distances of outfield fences have been normalized.

But there’s another major factor now being considered that could have a huge impact on the game: climate change.

As the world warms due to accumulating greenhouse gas emissions — changing the atmosphere, altering weather patterns, and impacting the quality of the field — ball players will be forced to adapt to new conditions. Here are three ways that a warming planet could (and in some cases already is) changing the game of baseball.

1. Increasing home runs. As a general rule, its a lot easier to hit in warmer temperatures. The sting from the bat on contact is greatly diminished and balls feel like they go a lot farther in the heat.

In 2004, University of Massachusetts researchers tested the velocity off the bat hitting baseballs cooled to 40 degrees Fahrenheit and heated to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. They found:

The lower the temperature, the slower the ball travel(s) after making contact with the bat. The 40 degree balls traveled at a velocity 2 percent less than the 120 degree balls. This means that a ball that would have traveled 400 feet at 120 degrees would instead travel 392 feet. That can be the distance between a home run and an out.

According to Hardball Times, a very reputable baseball website written by authors well respected in the baseball statistics and analysis world, “over 4% of batted balls leave the ballpark in 75 degree or warmer weather, but that rate drops to about 3.2% in … cold weather conditions.”

2. More difficult fielding. In addition to increasing the frequency and distance of home runs, heat and drought — made worse by climate change — wreaks havoc on baseball fields themselves.

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Kevin M. Gill, via Flickr

by Auden Schendler

Imagine that you are outside a house entirely engulfed in flames. Inside, you have been told, there are several children. But fire is pouring out of the windows and doors, and you can’t even approach the building due to the heat. This is a sad but unambiguous situation. The children will die, and you can’t do anything about it.

But let’s consider another scenario. As you look at the building, you notice that there’s one window that isn’t yet engulfed. In addition, because of a creek that runs beside the house, there’s a route to the window that would enable you to get to it without burning. And last, hanging out of that window is a young child who will die if you don’t grab her. In short, you have a reasonably good shot at saving the child. This situation is arguably as unambiguous as the first scenario. You have to save her.

This is the situation Mark Reynolds of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby found himself in when he visited Washington D.C. with organization founder Marshall Saunders. At the time, Saunders was trying to recruit Reynolds to help run the organization. But Saunders felt the project was impossible, a complex morass of a problem, and he had enough of those in his life. The two met with Senators and Congresspeople about the need for climate legislation, telling them that their position was wrong.  They utterly failed. But when they retooled their pitch, and started talking to elected officials about what might be a mutually agreeable strategy based on shared values—a revenue neutral carbon fee dividended back to taxpayers—combined with elimination of subsidies across the board for both fossil and renewable energies—it became clear that even Grover Norquist tax-pledge tea partiers could support it.

And Mark, who didn’t really want to get involved in this work, had a sinking feeling: Because there was a clear path to victory on the most pressing issue of our time, he had an obligation to act. And so he took the helm of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby http://www.citizensclimatelobby.org/. Their vision: a structured effort to push elected officials to act, combined with a bill nobody could oppose, offers a clear path to climate legislation in the U.S., the first step necessary in solving the problem globally.

This moral case for action (if it’s possible to save a life, you have to) is similar to a story about Steve Jobs. As Walter Isaacson describes it in the April issue of Harvard Business Review, Jobs was urging engineer Larry Kenyon to reduce the boot-up time of a Mac. Kenyon said it couldn’t be done. Jobs asked if it could be done if it would save a person’s life. Kenyon said that perhaps it could in that situation. So Jobs demonstrated that an extra ten seconds spread out over all the Mac users in the world was 100 lifetimes a year. A few weeks later the Macs were booting up 28 seconds faster. Kenyon didn’t have to act until the moral case was obvious. Once it was, he had no choice but to try. Not to succeed, but to try. Read more

CNN has two dynamite pieces on Solyndra, “Romney wrong on Solyndra facts” and “Seven things you should know about Solyndra.”

The first one, by Steve Hargreaves of CNN Money, ends:

It’s one thing to spin something to one’s advantage. It’s another to simply make things up to make the other guy look bad. Romney’s Solyndra speech was an example of the latter. Disgraceful.

Hargreaves shows that Mitt Romney’s key claim — “An independent inspector general looked at this investment and concluded that the Administration had steered money to friends and family and campaign contributors” — has no basis in fact.

The second piece, also by Hargreaves, lists 7 key facts:

1.  It was started by Bush: The DOE loan program that funded Solyndra was actually started by President Bush in 2005. It was intended to provide government support for “innovative technologies”….

In fact, as Climate Progress reported back in September, the “Bush Administration advanced the Solyndra loan guarantee for two years” before Obama became President.

2.  Congress thought there would be more failures: Two companies have declared bankruptcy under the loan program so far, out of the 33 projects funded. Congress was expecting more….

Congress appropriated money to cover expected losses, and multiple independent reviews have confirmed that the actual losses will likely be less than Congress expected.

3. Solyndra wanted more: The company applied for another $468 million in funding shortly after its first DOE loan closed. The government did not award the second request.

4. Taxpayers aren’t the only losers: Private investors lost almost twice what the government did — nearly $1 billion.

While much has been made that the largest private investor was an Obama supporter, the second largest was a fund controlled by the Walton family — of Wal-Mart fame. Walton family members are noted Republican donors.

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by Mindy S. Lubber, via The Huffington Post

There’s been a nasty change in the weather of late, and for businesses the forecast is simple: be prepared.

In 2011, extreme weather caused more than $148 billion in economic losses, and $55 billion in insured losses globally. A major chunk of those insured losses — more than $30 billion — were in the U.S. where 14 severe weather events caused losses of more than $1 billion each, far more than in any previous year. We’ve just lived through the warmest decade on record, seen unprecedented flash storms and flooding and watched as Texas suffered through the worst drought in its history.

Just a normal variation in the weather? “No,” is the overwhelming scientific consensus. Human activity is changing the climate, and the climate is changing the weather. Buckle up. It’s going to be a wild ride. And virtually every business in every sector of the economy is vulnerable.

That’s why Ceres, Oxfam America and Calvert Investments released a new guide last week, “Physical Risks from Climate Change,”designed to prepare businesses and investors for facing and disclosing climate-related risks.

What are they up against? For the agriculture and food and beverage sectors it means crop failures, loss of productive land and commodity price volatility. Drought will increase in some areas and severe flooding will rise in other places, while changing growing seasons and unpredictable pest and disease distribution will pose additional challenges.

For the insurance industry it means massive exposure to property damage and business losses from storms, wildfires, floods and droughts. For the electric power and oil and gas sectors it means supply disruptions and disabled infrastructure. The new report also details comparable risks in the apparel, mining and tourism sectors. In short, climate change is bringing with it a whole new world of risk for businesses, investors and the economy — risks that many companies are under obligation to disclose.

In both the U.S. and Canada, public companies have a legal obligation to disclose to investors any information a “reasonable investor” would find material. In 2010, after being petitioned by investors led by Ceres, which directs the 100-member Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR), the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued guidance to companies stating that climate-related risks meet this test. (INCR members manage about $10 trillion in assets.) Canadian securities regulators followed suit.

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Photo: Olfert via Flickr

by Jeff Turrentine, via OnEarth

Last November 7, Continental Airlines Flight 1403 took off from Houston, bound for Chicago. The trip was utterly unremarkable save for one thing. Thanks to its fuel — a blend of standard jet diesel and a biofuel derived from algae — the flight reduced carbon dioxide emissions by an amount equivalent to what a car would spew out in 30,000 miles of driving.

In a February speech, President Obama gave a shout-out to the technology that helped make this flight possible. Algae-derived biofuel, he said, was part of a larger national plan to wean us from foreign petroleum while significantly reducing atmospheric carbon levels.

This technology isn’t in the blue-sky or even beta-testing stage of the R&D sequence. It has already been proved in the lab, and it’s now being proved in the marketplace, where some very big clients — among them major airlines, the U.S. Navy, and Bunge, one of the world’s largest agribusiness conglomerates — are placing orders for millions of gallons of algae-derived biofuel from dozens of manufacturers.

But that fact wasn’t enough to stop a fusillade of cynical rejoinders. The day after the president’s speech, Rush Limbaugh couldn’t seem to stop using the phrase “pond scum” in his attempt to portray the technology as wacky pseudoscience. One Fox News pundit mocked the notion of finding fuel “in your swimming pool when the pool man’s on vacation.” Newt Gingrich tried to make the very idea of algal oil into a laugh line, at one point holding up a gas-pump nozzle at a filling-station photo op and proclaiming: “There is no algae that’s gonna come out of this, this summer.”

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The science conspiracy among "pals" is fiction.

by Dana Nucitelli and John Mashey, via Skeptical Science

We often hear claims from climate contrarians that climate scientists are guilty of what they describe as “pal review.”

The conspiracy theory goes something like this – climate scientists conduct biased research with the goal of confirming the human-caused global warming theory.  They then submit their biased results to a peer-reviewed journal with friendly editors (“pals”) who pass their paper along to friendly reviewers (other “pals”) who give their fraudulent work the green light for publication.  Thus, the contrarians argue, the preponderance of peer-reviewed literature supporting human-caused global warming is really just a sign of corruption amongst climate scientists.

However, while climate contrarians are never able to produce any evidence to support their conspiracy theory, John Mashey has thoroughly documented a real world example of true pal review.  Contrary to the standard conspiracy theory, the pal review did not involve mainstream climate scientists, but instead the climate contrarians themselves.

The True Story of Climate Research Pal Review

Mashey has done an excellent job documenting a real life case of pal review, which happened at the journal Climate Research between 1997 and 2003.  That particular journal was once again brought to the forefront in the recent second Climategate stolen email release.

In those emails, various climate scientists had expressed concern that Climate Research was publishing shoddy papers by a small group of climate contrarians, and discussed what they could do about it.  The most infamous of these papers was one by Soon and Baliunas (2003) which concluded that current global temperatures are not anomalous compared the past 1,000 years.  After publishing this paper, Soon was invited by Senator James Inhofe to testify before US Congress, and the Soon and Baliunas paper was used by Congressional Republicans to justify opposition to climate legislation.

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By Brad Johnson, campaign manager for Forecast the Facts

Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) is scheduled to be the keynote speaker for the Heartland Institute’s benefit dinner in August, 2012. Heartland has lost more than $1 million in expected corporate funding in the wake of public outrage over its climate denial, reducing president Joe Bast to beg for more financial support. Walker is a perfect fit for the anti-science extremists at Heartland — like them, he’s Koch-funded global warming conspiracy theorist. Walker has attacked investment in high-speed rail, wind power, and even recycling.