Last week, several documents that purportedly came from the Heartland Institute appeared on the Web, laying out the organization's financial efforts to undercut the mainstream understanding of climate science. Although the Heartland admitted that most of the materials were genuine, it claims they had been obtained via deception, and that one of the documents (the most inflammatory) was a fake. Now, a prominent environmental researcher has admitted that he impersonated a Heartland board member in order to obtain the documents, but claims they are all genuine.

Peter Gleick is the founder and current president of the Pacific Institute, where he specializes in research on the water cycle. His research can be provocative—some of it suggested that the US has already passed peak water—but has been considered important enough to get him elected to the National Academies of Science.

If he was known to the public, however, it was probably due to his writing at Forbes, where he aggressively defended the scientific consensus on climate change and provided a counterpoint to another one of the Forbes bloggers, James Taylor, who is a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute. (Taylor's work has graced our pages in the past, as he helped set off a misguided media frenzy over a climate paper.) Gleick's battle with the Heartland now seems to have led him astray.

According to a statement that Gleick placed on the Huffington Post, he received a printout of the Heartland's strategy document in the mail (the one that the Heartland now claims is a forgery). Instead of passing that on to a journalist, Gleick claims he attempted to verify it himself, and posed as someone involved with the Heartland in order to get further documents sent to him. His ruse worked, and he received a set of financial documents in the mail. He then leaked the full collection to a number of climate bloggers.

Gleick's impersonation of someone at the Heartland may possibly be illegal, and it is certainly unethical. He has been offering his resignation to some of the groups he's worked with, and those groups are accepting it.

The irony of all of this is that a number of reporters have asked people named in the documents about the Heartland money that they've received, and they've been willing to confirm that they are involved in the projects named in the materials. Gleick didn't have to do any of this, which makes his actions that much more difficult to fathom.

What we know about the documents

Gleick's stepping forward, however, doesn't clarify much about the documents themselves. Heartland has admitted that several of them were genuine. Most of these simply confirm what we already knew: the group doesn't like mainstream climate science, and has funded people who have prominently attacked it. We can now attach dollar figures to some of that support, but those don't necessarily tell us all that much.

The real surprise of the documents was the Heartland's education program, which will apparently prepare material for the public schools. It's probably safe to assume that this would present a misleading picture of climate science, based on the writings of people like Taylor and the fact that the Heartland-funded NIPCC reports include material from Christopher Monckton, who has developed a reputation for serially mishandling scientific information.

However, it's entirely possible to accept that the people at the Heartland sincerely believe they are trying to do something useful. The only thing that suggested otherwise is a strategy document, which indicated that Heartland was hoping that its educational materials would suggest that climate change is confused and controversial in order to convince teachers to stay away from it.

That document, however, is the one that the Heartland has claimed is a forgery. And Gleick's admission, aside from raising general questions about his credibility, doesn't do anything to clarify that. Unless someone else comes forward, we're unlikely to ever find out whether the document is real.

Meanwhile, Heartland has gone on the attack. After spending years promoting the content of e-mails stolen from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia, it has suddenly found religion when it comes to the misappropriation of private documents, and is threatening to sue anyone who has hosted them. It has also said that, "We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes." Now that it knows the person is Gleick, the key question will be whether Heartland can find a law enforcement agency that will follow up on this information.