This scandal started with a series of emails, eight of them, between January 27 and February 10, 2012 initially asking to add an additional email address for a board member of the Heartland Institute and having been purportedly sent by this same board member  and escalating to requests for sensitive confidential documents. However, the initial email was not sent by a board member and the additional email address did not belong to a board member.  When Heartland complied, the documents were stolen by someone outside of their organization and not for the purpose for which they were released.  There may be a civil and or criminal case before the fall out is complete.

The Heartland Institute is in Chicago and Washington DC. It was founded in 1984 and its mission is to “discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.”  It is known for hosting six International Conferences on Climate Change According to its web site “The Heartland Institute's Center on Climate and Environmental Policy produces an ambitious program of research and educational projects in defense of free-market environmentalism.”

The documents were leaked into the blogosphere February 14, 2012, releasing personal information of donors and board members, causing an outpouring of derision toward Heartland Institute, causing embarrassment to HI, potentially harming HI’s future fundraising efforts, and causing speculation as to who stole the identity of the board member to gain access to the HI documents.

Additionally, in a released statement on February 15, 2012, the Heartland Institute’s Communications Director Jim Lakely announced that one of the documents is a fake.
In the release posted on the HI web site “One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.”

Ross Kaminsky wrote in the Spectacle Blog on the Amercan Spectator web site on 2-17-2012 that he suspected Dr Peter H Gleick.  Ross Kaminsky is a Senior Fellow, Finance for the Heartland Institute.  He wrote, “One obvious suspect in the Heartland document theft -- and this is just my speculation -- is Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security and a true enemy of the Heartland Institute. Gleick is a committed alarmist rent-seeker who seems quite bitter that he shares Forbes magazine’s pages with Heartland’s James Taylor.”

Megan McArdle wrote in The Atlantic web site on 2-17-2012 that she thought the one document was a fake and that the culprit was on the west coast.  She is a senior editor at the Atlantic.

Dr Gleick’s last blog post on Forbes had been February 5, 2012.  On February 16, 2012, he had resigned his chairmanship of the Task Force on Scientific Ethics for the American Geophysical Union.

On February 20, 2012, Dr Peter H Gleick blogged a confession (of sorts) on the Huffington Post web site admitting to soliciting and receiving information from the Heartland Institute in someone else’s name and distributing the documents anonymously.  He had another explanation for the document the Heartland Institute had claimed to be a fake.

That same day in the Dot Earth blog of the New York Times Opinion page, Andrew Revkin reacted to Dr Gleick’s blog post, and also, the Heartland Institute reacted.  The American Geophysical Union posted their reaction on February 21, 2012.  The Pacific Institute posted their reaction on February 22, 2012.

Dr Gleick was a co-founder and president of Pacific Institute.  Their mission, according to their web site, is to: “create a healthier planet and sustainable communities. We conduct interdisciplinary research and partner with stakeholders to produce solutions
that advance environmental protection, economic development, and social equity—in California, nationally, and internationally.”

By February 24, 2012 in The Guardian a British web site Suzanne Goldenberg announced Dr Gleick had asked for and received a leave of absence from Pacific Institute.

As the emails flew between interested spectators, thoughts turned to speculating as to the desperation Dr Gleick must have felt in order compromise his ethics so sharply while he was chair of a task force on scientific ethics.  Knowing how difficult it can be to find funding for one's work and knowing how much money is being thrown at anthropogenic global warming climate change projects, people recognized it can create difficult dilemmas for scientists. People longed for simpler demarcations, and were reminded of Dr Richard Feynman, a Nobelist physicist, teaching (see video) how a scientific law is discovered, “If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science"

Also on spectators minds, was the record crowd at the Oregon Chapter of American Meteorological Society January 25, 2012 where Dr Gordon J Fulks, physicist, and Dr George H Taylor, former state climatologist, made their addresses on Climate Change.  (see video links)  We had better pay attention because a lot of public policy making is done with carbon restrictions and sustainability as a driving force behind it.

And a lot of this public policy built on carbon counting and sustainability is extremely detrimental to our economy.