[Hockey team member gets cash bonus]: A Deserved Award for Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate and NASA - NYTimes.com

Gavin Schmidt, the climate modeler at NASA and Columbia University who has long endured the slings and arrows that come with blogging on climate, has now gained a laurel for his efforts — the inaugural $25,000 Climate Communications Prize of the American Geophysical Union.

The award is well deserved. Real Climate, particularly through Schmidt’s data-centered and non-ideological posts, has developed into a must-track node in the Web conversation on climate science and its meaning to societies.
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Those trying to undermine Schmidt’s credibility by sifting for evidence that he — a federal employee — may have blogged during business hours might run up against the reality that NASA’s 1958 charter from Congress requires the agency to communicate its findings to the public. He could easily make the argument that he’s actually doing his job.