Global warming activist Peter H. Gleick admitted Monday night in a statement published by The Huffington Post to stealing documents from The Heartland Institute which “outline plans to promote a curriculum that would cast doubt on the scientific finding that fossil fuel emissions endanger the long-term welfare of the planet” and “suggest that Heartland has spent several million dollars in the past five years in its efforts to undermine climate science,” a New York Times article said, according to The Daily Caller.

According to The Caller, Gleick said that he had anonymously received a Heartland document and, in an effort to confirm its accuracy, stole other documents from Heartland.

In his statement to The Post, Gleick apologized and expressed regret for his actions.

“Given the potential impact, however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget,” Gleick wrote, according to The Caller.

“I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues,” he added. “I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication.” But according to The Caller, Heartland said that at least one document, “A Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” had been forged.

“[Gleick] claims he did not write the forged memo, but only stole the documents to confirm the content of the memo he received from an anonymous source,” Heartland Institute President Joseph L. Bast said in a statement, according to The Caller. “This too is unbelievable. Many independent commentators already have concluded the memo was most likely written by Gleick.”

“Gleick’s crime was a serious one,” Bast said, according to The Caller. “The documents he admits stealing contained personal information about Heartland staff members, donors and allies, the release of which has violated their privacy and endangered their personal safety.”

Bast added that Heartland will consult with legal counsel, and, in the meantime, has asked that publishers retract and remove the information distributed by Gleick.

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Forty-four scientists from 28 colleges and universities across Iowa are calling on state legislators to acknowledge and address the issue of climate change, ABC affiliate KCRG-TV9 reports.

According to KCRG, the scientists sent a letter to all state legislators on Tuesday, calling for candidates for public office at the national, state and local levels to “acknowledge the overwhelming balance of evidence for the underpinning causes of climate change, to develop appropriate policy responses, and to develop local and statewide strategies to adapt to near-term changes in climate.”

The letter was sent in response to the January 2011 report, “Climate Change Impacts on Iowa,” which was authored by the 11-member Iowa Climate Change Impacts Committee to the Iowa General Assembly and governor, David Courard-Hauri, a Drake University professor of environmental science and co-author of the report, told KCRG.

According to KCRG, the report says that Iowa’s changing climate is already affecting the state’s economy and the well-being of its residents. Climate impacts included:

• a long-term upward trend in precipitation and temperature
• an increase in extreme heavy summer precipitation in the last 40 years
• winter temperatures increasing six times more than summer temperatures
• nighttime temperatures increasing more than daytime temperatures since 1970
• an average of eight to nine more frost free days than 100 years ago, providing a longer growing season, earlier spring melt-off, and longer ice-free periods on waterways
• a longer growing season and more precipitation and a lack of extreme high daytime temperatures have contributed to better crop yields
• an increase in extreme rainfall events, higher humidity and higher nighttime temperatures have required costly adaptations

According to KCRG, the letter cited “enormous expense to recover from repeated 500-year floods.” Ames, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines and Iowa City have all suffered multimillion dollar losses since 1993, and 85 of Iowa’s 99 counties were declared federal disaster areas in 2008, the letter also said.

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One of the most severe droughts in state history could cause a Texas agency to cut water to thousands of rice farmers, The Associated Press reports.

The agency, known as the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), is expected to announce March 1 that it will not release water to rice farmers in Wharton, Colorado and Matagorda counties — some of the poorest in the state, with poverty levels above the national average. The three counties account for 35 to 45 percent of the 160,000 to 200,000 acres dedicated to rice farming in Texas.

“This is the very first time this has happened,” Ronald Gertson, whose family, for five generations, has grown rice in the state, told AP. “Rice irrigation was here before LCRA ever existed.”

Gertson told AP that he can grow about a third of the amount of rice he usually grows if he uses groundwater, but he might get about 45 percent of the acres he normally plants if he really pushes it.

Gertson and other farmers, however, are already looking for ways to cut costs and simply get through the year ahead. Gertson has already laid off one of his two pilots and has dropped a $50,000-a-year insurance policy on one of his two planes. “We’ve cut back just about everything we can,” Billy Hefner, who owns a 1,100-acre rice farm and ranch in Garwood that provides the sole income for his family, told AP.

According to AP, Hefner said that he can irrigate 90 acres with well water and possibly get water for another 400 or so acres because his farm has senior water rights along the river. At best, only half of his business will be affected if LCRA decides to release water to his farm based on senior water rights, he told AP. “Or I could be down to the 90 acres,” he added.

To recover, Texas would need about 5 to 8 inches of rain to produce about 32.6 billion gallons of runoff into the region’s lakes, LCRA meteorologist Bob Rose said, according to AP. While it’s possible, Rose told AP that he “wasn’t very optimistic” about it happening in the near future. The weather is still being influenced by La Nina, he added.

Gertson told AP that he’s worried about losing the rice-dependent businesses whose losses won’t be covered by crop insurance: rice dryers, truckers, seed growers and storage facilities. “Their facilities are gone,” he said, according to AP. “We’ve got some rice dryers in the area who were just barely making it to begin with.”

Dick Ottis, president and chief executive of Rice Belt Warehouse in El Campo, told AP that he doubts if his rice drying and storage business will suffer much. However, he has laid off about 15 workers and is preparing to shut down one or two of his five plants.

“The $64,000 question out there is, how do we do this?” Ottis said, according to AP. “Because we’ve never been here before. We have never seen the situation with water being this bad.”

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A solar array — the largest end-user-owned solar array in the nation — will power Apple’s 500,000-square-foot Maiden, N.C. data center, according to Apple, who revealed the news Monday in a report on its carbon footprint.

Apple uses the center as part of the back-end behind iCloud.

The company had this to say in the report: “Our new data center in Maiden, North Carolina, demonstrates our commitment to reducing the environmental impact of our facilities through energy-efficient, green building design. The facility has earned the coveted LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. We know of no other data center of comparable size that has achieved this level of LEED certification. Our goal is to run the Maiden facility with high percentage renewable energy mix, and we have major projects under way to achieve this — including building the nation’s largest end user-owned solar array and building the largest nonutility fuel cell installation in the United States.”

Energy-efficient design elements of the Maiden facility include:

• A chilled water storage system to improve chiller efficiency by transferring 10,400 kWh of electricity consumption from peak to off-peak hours each day
• Use of “free” outside air cooling through a waterside economizer operation during night and cool-weather hours, which, along with water storage, allows the chillers to be turned off more than 75 percent of the time
• Extreme precision in managing cooling distribution for cold air containment pods with variable-speed fans controlled to exactly match airflow to server requirements from moment to moment
• Power distributed at higher voltages, which increases efficiency by reducing power loss
• White cool-roof design to provide maximum solar reflectivity
• High-efficiency LED lighting combined with motion sensors
• Real-time power monitoring and analytics during operations
• Construction processes that utilized 14 percent recycled materials, diverted 93 percent of construction waste from landfills, and sourced 41 percent of purchased materials within 500 miles of the site

According to the report, Apple’s 2011 Total Footprint is as follows:

• Manufacturing = 61 percent
• Product Use = 30 percent
• Transportation = 5 percent
• Recycling = 2 percent
• Facilities = 2 percent

“For 2011, we estimate that Apple was responsible for 23.1 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions,” the company said in the report.

Apple explains how it calculated its carbon footprint: “To accurately measure a company’s environmental footprint, it’s important to look at the impact that company’s products have on the planet. For the past three years, Apple has used a comprehensive life cycle analysis to determine where our greenhouse gas emissions come from. That means adding up the emissions generated from the manufacturing, transportation, use, and recycling of our products, as well as the emissions generated by our facilities. We’ve learned that about 98 percent of Apple’s carbon footprint is directly related to our products. The remaining 2 percent is related to our facilities.”

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Global warming is causing chipmunks in the High Sierra to seek higher, cooler ground as the average temperature in the Yosemite region has increased by about 5.4 degrees over the past 100 years, a study from the University of California Berkeley revealed, according to an article published by Summit Voice.

At the turn of the 20th century, alpine chipmunks were sighted at elevations of 7,800 feet, according to research conducted by Joseph Grinnell, UC Berkeley’s first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and colleagues. Now, the chipmunks appears to be moving to even higher elevations, shifting its range upward by about 1,640 feet.

According to the study, the chipmunks’ habitat has become more divided, resulting in small, isolated populations that are becoming genetically impoverished.

“Climate change is implicated as the cause of geographic shifts observed among birds, small mammals and plants … Under continued warming, the alpine chipmunk could be on the trajectory towards becoming threatened or even extinct,” study lead author Emily Rubidge, who conducted the research while earning a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, said, according to Summit Voice.

Alpine chipmunks are high-elevation creatures so it’s not surprising that they would be more sensitive to global warming, the researchers said, according to Summit Voice.

According to the UC Berkeley News Center: “To test the genetic impact from that loss of geographic range, researchers compared genetic markers from 146 modern-day alpine chipmunks with those from 88 of their historical counterparts. Samples were collected from seven paired sites throughout Yosemite.

“As a control, the researchers also looked at the genetics – both historic and modern – of lodgepole chipmunks (Tamias speciosus), a lower elevation species that had not changed its range over the past century.

“The analysis of genetic markers revealed a significant decline in “allele richness” among the recently sampled alpine chipmunk populations compared with their historic counterparts. Moreover, the researchers noted that the modern chipmunks were more genetically differentiated across sites than in the past, a sign of increased fragmentation in the alpine chipmunk population.

“In comparison, there were no significant changes in genetic diversity detected among the lodgepole chipmunks, a species found at elevations from 4,900 to 9,800 feet.”

Justin Brashares, associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, told Summit Voice: “Much of what we read and hear about the effects of climate change on biodiversity is based on model projections and simulations, and these models typically involve many moving parts and lots of uncertainty. Thanks to the baseline provided by Joseph Grinnell’s pioneering efforts in the early 20th century, we are able to go beyond projections to document how climate is altering life in California. The research led by Emily is novel and important because it shows empirically that climate change has led to the loss of genetic diversity in a wild mammal over the last several decades.”

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Climate change is killing off yellow cedar trees in Alaska’s Panhandle, researchers from the U.S. Forest Service confirmed, according to The Associated Press.

Yellow cedars can live more than 1,000 years, but if the soil surrounding the trees’ roots is not insulated by snow, its roots can freeze. With less snow on the ground in recent years, yellow cedars on nearly half a million acres in southeast Alaska and 123,000 acres in the Canadian province of British Columbia have been killed.

This study indicates the increasing importance climate change will play in managing forests in the future, Paul Schaberg, a Forest Service plant pathologist from Burlington, Vt. and one of five authors of a paper about yellow cedars in the February edition of Bioscience journal, said, according to AP.

“As time goes on and climates change even more, other species, other locations, are likely to experience similar kinds of progressions, so you might do well to understand this one so you can address those future things,” Schaberg said, as quoted by AP.

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The wind power industry is expecting “massive layoffs and stalled or abandoned projects” after Congress, on Thursday, failed to reach an agreement on a deal that would renew a vital tax credit, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Illinois — home to more than 150 companies that support the wind power industry — will be hit especially hard by the decision. According to the Tribune, Illinois currently has 13,892 megawatts of wind projects waiting to be connected to the electric grid. Those projects are enough to power 3.3 million homes per year.

The tax credit extension would have provided an income tax credit of 2.2 cents/kilowatt-hour for the production of electricity from wind turbines. Wind power proponents wanted the extension to be included in legislation aimed at extending payroll tax cuts, but Congress did not include it in the bill.
The tax credits could be included in another piece of legislation or come through as a stand-alone bill, but that’s not likely to happen before the upcoming presidential election, Washington insiders say, according to the Tribune.

Even if we could get the extension through by November, it will still be too late to avoid layoffs and project delays since projects slated for 2013 should already be nearing completion, the wind industry said, according to the Tribune.

The February deal was too late also, Naomi Lovinger, spokeswoman for Nordex, a wind turbine manufacturer with its North American headquarters in Chicago, told the Tribune. That’s because wind projects generally have a long lead time. For example, projects can be in the works for two to five years due to legal hurdles, including permits and environmental testing. “There is years and years of work that is done before a developer turns to a company like Nordex and says, ‘Hey, we’re ready to go and now we want to talk about what turbines to put in and where we want to put them in,’” Lovinger told the Tribune.

Developers could receive the expiring tax credit — provided they have turbines up and running before the end of the year. But that isn’t likely to happen. “We simply have not see[n] that strong demand for new power generation,” Daniel Shreve, director and partner of MAKE Consulting, a wind energy consultancy with an office in Chicago, told the Tribune.

Paul Bowman, vice president of development at wind developer EON Climate and Renewables North America Inc., which has its North American headquarters in Chicago, told the Tribune that his company had $1 billion in construction projects planned for 2013. Those projects, which were all tied to the tax credit extension, are now in jeopardy.

“If we got an extension in the next couple of months, we’d be able to build some or all of those projects,” Bowman told the Tribune. “If it gets extended at the end of the year, it is too late.” Some projects will have to be abandoned altogether because land contracts and agreements with utilities have expiration dates, Bowman continued.

Turbine makers and development companies have already begun laying off workers, Bowman told the Tribune. Consequently, some of them are turning to foreign markets.

Dan McDevitt, vice president of operations at Nordex, told the Tribune that his company will likely look to Canada, Mexico and Latin America for business. “We’re not growing. We’re not going to be adding people. It’s sort of a stand still,” McDevitt told the Tribune.

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Global 100 recently released its list of the 100 most sustainable companies. According to information from global100.org, “The Global 100 is an annual project initiated by Corporate Knights Inc., the company for clean capitalism. The Global 100 is the most extensive data-driven corporate sustainability assessment in existence, and inclusion is limited to a select group of the top 100 large-cap companies in the world. Launched in 2005, the annual Global 100 is announced each year during the World Economic Forum in Davos.”

Well-known companies that made the list include:

• Glaxosmithkline plc
• Hitachi Chemical Company Ltd.
• HSBC Holdings plc
• L’Oreal SA
• Nissan Motor Co. Ltd.
• Prudential
• Roche Holding AG
• Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.
• Siemens AG
• Toyota Motor Corp.
• Vodafone Group plc

Only eight U.S. companies made the list:

• Life Technologies Corp. #15
• Intel Corp. #18
• Agilent Technologies Inc. #59
• Johnson Controls Inc. #64
• Procter & Gamble Co. #66
• IBM Corp. #68
• Baxter International Inc. #86
• Prologis #90

Furthermore, not one U.S. company made the “Top 10” list. Companies in the Top 10 were located in the following countries:

• Denmark (2 companies)
• Brazil
• Norway (2 companies)
• Netherlands
• United Kingdom
• France
• Belgium
• Sweden

The full list of companies and their rankings can be viewed here.

What do you think? Are there other companies you think should have been included on the list? Do you think U.S. companies can do much better? Leave your comments below.

The following information was disclosed on the website of the U.S. Department of State:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will announce a climate and clean air initiative to reduce short-lived climate pollutants on Thursday, February 16^th, at 9:30 a.m. at the Department of State. Short-lived climate pollutants such as methane, black carbon, and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) together account for approximately one-third of current global warming, and have significant impacts on public health, the environment, and world food productivity.

She will be joined by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson and senior representatives from Bangladesh, Canada, Ghana, Mexico, Sweden, and the UN Environment Programme.

This event is open to the press.

Pre-set time for video cameras: 8:15 a.m. from the 23rd Street entrance lobby.

Final access time for journalists and still photographers: 8:30 a.m. from the 23rd Street entrance lobby.

Media representatives may attend this event upon presentation of one of the following: (1) a U.S. Government-issued identification card (Department of State, White House, Congress, Department of Defense or Foreign Press Center), (2) a media-issued photo identification card, or (3) a letter from their employer on letterhead verifying their employment as a journalist, accompanied by an official photo identification card (driver’s license, passport). Please allow 15 minutes to process through security.

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A recent study published in American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Environmental Science & Technology journal says that more than 1 in 3 counties in the United States could face a “high” or “extreme” risk of water shortages due to climate change by the year 2050.

While this news may be a bit daunting, a remote Indian village located on the western edge of the Tibetan plateau may have stumbled upon a much-needed solution to this problem — artificial glaciers.

According to an article published by National Geographic, the village of Skara in the Ladakh region of India is responding to water shortages due to global warming by creating these large masses of ice.

According to National Geographic, survival for the people of Skara and surrounding villages means being able to grow crops not only for their own consumption but to sell in neighboring towns as well. Historically, water for these crops came from glacial meltwater high in the Himalayas. In recent decades, however, climate change has caused water shortages in April and May, when the villagers typically sow seeds for the summer season. If they are unable to sow during that time period, there will not have a crop for that year.

As a result, the people of Skara sought other means to provide water to their crops. So, just how did this remote village come up with such an innovative solution? National Geographic explains:

“One winter in the late 1980s, an engineer from Skara named Chewang Norphel came up with a possible solution to his village’s problem while strolling around his backyard.

Norphel noticed that a small stream had frozen solid under the shade of a poplar grove, though it flowed freely elsewhere in his sunny yard. The reason for this, he realized, was that the flowing water was moving too quickly to freeze, while the sluggish trickle of water beneath the grove was not.

“Over the next several years, Norphel worked to create an irrigation system that functioned using the same simple natural principle. The result has been Ladakh’s artificial glaciers. Ten have been built to date.

“To create the glaciers, Norphel and his team of engineers divert water from rivers into neighboring valleys that have been carefully penned in with rocks. This step usually takes place in the winter months of October through December. To slow the water down to a trickle, the diversion canals often take long meandering routes around mountainsides. Once it arrives in the valley, the water freezes in a shallow layer in small pools. The process is repeated until the stacked layers of ice are several feet thick. If too much water is added too quickly, the result is a slushy pit.”

“It takes a lot of patience,” Amy Higgins, a graduate student at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies who worked on the artificial glacier project, told National Geographic.

Peter Gleick, a water expert and president of the Pacific Institute research center in Oakland, Calif. who was not involved in the project, called the invention ground-breaking. “I think they’re great and likely to play a role, at least in the short term, in helping some of these high-elevation villages deal with the very real and immediate changes to the melting glaciers in the Himalayas,” he told National Geographic.

Gleick cautioned, however, that in the long run, the gradual melting of high-elevation natural glaciers will make it difficult to create and maintain the artificial glaciers. “I’m not optimistic that the [artificial glaciers] are going to be sustainable in the long run,” he told National Geographic.

William Cooper, an environmental chemist and the director of the Urban Water Research Center at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the project, called the artificial glaciers an “interesting and noble idea,” National Geographic reports.

“If he is able to actually store that much water as ice and release it later by natural processes, it’s a low-cost alternative to dams,” Cooper told National Geographic.

According to National Geographic, Norphel calculated that a real glacier containing about one million cubic feet (approx. 7.5 million gallons) of water could be used to create an artificial glacier capable of irrigating 380 acres of land.

“Even though that sounds like it’s a lot of water, it doesn’t sound like an awful lot to me,” Cooper was quoted as saying by National Geographic.

A water reuse plant in Southern California typically recycles about 70 million gallons of water per day — much more than what would be used to irrigate the 380 acres of land, Cooper continued. It’s also a small amount when you compare it to the flow rate of the Indus River, which is where most of the glacial melt will end up anyway, so, it’s unlikely that there will be any major negative downstream effects, Cooper told National Geographic.

When asked if she thought the artificial glaciers might have a negative downstream effect, Higgins told National Geographic: “In my opinion, no. More of the water is taken up by the crops being grown, but it would otherwise flow unused out to the Arabian Sea during October and November.”

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