From the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required):
Congressman Demands Complete Records on Climate Research by 3 Scientists Who Support Theory of Global Warming By RICHARD MONASTERSKY
Washington
In a sign of how climate science has grown increasingly political, the
chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and
Commerce is investigating three professors whose work suggests that the
earth's climate is warmer now than at any time in many centuries and that
increasing levels of greenhouse gases from burning fossils fuels are
largely to blame.
More below the fold
In letters to the three scientists last week, Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas
Republican, demanded detailed documentation about the hundreds of studies
on which they were an author or co-author. Mr. Barton also sent a letter to
the director of the National Science Foundation that requests information
about the work of the three professors, as well as a list of all grants and
awards in the area of climate and paleoclimate science, which number 2,700
in the past 10 years.
Barton's letter to IPCC from June 23, 2005:
http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/Letters/062305_Pachauri.pdf/
This is scientific harassment. The peer-review process and the academic misconduct process is the proper way to go about dealing with scientists. And these scientists are well-respected and commonly cited in their field. Mr. Barton in clearly working for his donors in the oil industry.
Several climate scientists reached by The Chronicle expressed dismay at the
investigation and described it as harassment.
The investigation focuses on studies by Michael E. Mann, an assistant
professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia; Raymond
S. Bradley, a professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst; and Malcolm K. Hughes, a professor in the Laboratory of
Tree-Ring Research of the University of Arizona.
Several independent studies have come to conclusions similar to theirs.
Their 1998-99 studies figured prominently in the an important IPCC report (2001)that detailed the evidence supporting global climate change. Since then, they have been under intense scrutiny. This is the current manifestation of that scrutiny...and it's coming from Congressman Barton (R) Texas.
Contact Joe Barton
But
the work of Mr. Mann and his colleagues has served as a lightning rod for
attacks by skeptics of greenhouse warming, in part because their early
studies in 1998 and 1999 figured prominently in a 2001 report by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-sponsored group known as
the IPCC.
In <http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/Letters/06232005_1570.htm>the
letters, Mr. Barton says he started the investigation because "this dispute
surrounding your studies bears directly on important questions about the
federally funded work upon which climate studies rely and the quality and
transparency of analyses used to support the IPCC assessment process."
*Mr. Mann is using this as an opportunity to speak about the overwhelming evidence before Congress. He says he is optimistic that the evidence will lead them to join with the consensus.*
Mr. Mann said he would comply with the congressman's requests, but because
of the legal issues involved, he said he could not comment in detail. "I am
pleased that the U.S. Congress has shown in interest in the issue of
climate change," he told The Chronicle. "I am confident that when members
of Congress take a look at the science, they will join with the consensus
of the world's scientists that the earth is indeed warming, and that human
activity has played a primary role in the warming observed in recent decades."
*Other scientists, like myself, are appalled:*
But climate scientists in the United States and in Europe said they were
shocked by Mr. Barton's requests.
"It's a technical form of harassment by people in Congress who are opposed
to global warming and basically want to discredit the science so they don't
have to worry about the policy alternatives," said Thomas Crowley, a
professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at
Duke University.
The article goes on to detail Barton's extensive connections with, and funding from the oil-and-gas industry:
Mr. Barton worked in the oil-and-gas industry before being elected to
Congress, in 1984. In the past decade, he has consistently ranked as one of
the top five recipients of campaign contributions from that industry,
according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research
group that tracks money in politics.
Detail of the research that is being attacked:
Mr. Barton could not be reached for comment on Thursday. A staff member in
his office said the letters spoke for themselves.
In their first study, published in Nature in 1998, Mr. Mann and his
colleagues examined long-term records of glacial ice layers, coral growth
layers, and tree rings, all of which store information about how climate
has changed, year by year, at specific spots around the globe. By
mathematically combining records from various sites, the researchers
developed a temperature history of the Northern Hemisphere dating back six
centuries. They subsequently extended their analysis to cover the last two
millennia.
In graphical form, the data show temperatures going up and down over the
centuries by small amounts and then shooting upward in the 20th century --
a shape that has been dubbed "the hockey stick."
In writing its 2001 report, the IPCC considered Mr. Mann's first two
studies and several other separate analyses to draw the conclusion that the
late 20th century was likely to have been warmer than any time in the past
millennium. Mr. Mann was one of 10 lead authors of the chapter in the
report that dealt with such data -- a connection that Mr. Barton wants to
investigate. He wrote a letter to the chairman of the IPCC asking for
clarification concerning Mr. Mann's role in drafting the report.
The history of the controversy over this work is detailed here. Apparently, a mining industry scientist has been corresponding with the researchers about some issues he has with the data.
Mr. Mann's work drew the attention of Steven McIntyre, an independent
researcher who has worked in the mining industry. Over the past several
years, Mr. McIntyre has held long-running correspondences with Mr. Mann and
other climate researchers, requesting data and computer codes in order to
check their work.
Mr. McIntyre, working with Ross McKitrick, an associate professor of
economics at Canada's University of Guelph, has published several papers
accusing Mr. Mann and his co-authors of making errors in their analyses. In
the meantime, the two groups have waged a war over those issues on two Web
sites, <http://www.realclimate.org>RealClimate and
<http://www.climateaudit.org>Climate Audit.
According to Mr. Crowley, the Duke professor, he received repeated e-mail
messages from Mr. McIntyre demanding data and documentation, which grew
increasingly threatening. "I'm usually happy to send people some stuff,"
said Mr. Crowley. However, he added, "McIntyre comes back time and again.
He could take up a huge amount of time. It's like you have nothing better
to do in your life than answer questions from Steven McIntyre."
Mr. McIntyre was unavailable on Thursday to talk about his dispute with Mr.
Mann. On his blog, he says that Mr. Mann has released data but not the
computer code from his studies.
According to David Stonner, of the Congressional-affairs office at the
National Science Foundation, Mr. McIntyre contacted the foundation last
year to ask for Mr. Mann's computer code. Mr. Stonner said the agency had
told Mr. McIntyre that the code was the intellectual property of Mr. Mann
and that it was up to him whether to release it.
More input from the scientific community:
Critics of the letters said they were clearly intended for political
purposes, not scientific ones. Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of physics of
the oceans at Potsdam University, in Germany, said that "when you read
these letters, it becomes clear this is not a genuine interest in getting
the best scientific information but rather this is an attempt to intimidate
individual scientists."
James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in
New York City, said "there is something rotten in Washington."
"These requests from Representative Barton," Mr. Hansen said, "seem to be
harassment and a threat to researchers and agencies that deliver scientific
results that displease politicians."
Hans von Storch, a professor of meteorology at the University of Hamburg
and director of the Institute of Coastal Research of the GKSS Research
Center, in Geesthacht, Germany, has published his own report that
criticizes the studies by Mr. Mann and his colleagues. He said Mr. Mann
made some mistakes in his analyses and did not explain his methods well
enough to allow other scientists to independently check his work
(<http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i02/02a01601.htm>The Chronicle, September
5, 2003).
But Mr. von Storch distinguished between publishing a description of
methodology and releasing computer codes. "If I did get such a letter, I
would become desperate," he said. His colleagues often write the code for
his studies, and he said, "if I asked my colleagues whether they still had
the code, I'm not sure they would."