Last June, Texas Republican Joe Barton began what can only be described as a crusade against those scientists issuing studies affirming the existence of climate change. He stood on the House floor and openly questioned the scientific standards of their research, the reasons behind their interest in the subject, and the honor of the scientific community.
Yesterday, after Barton’s repeated calls for a new Congressional report on the matter, the answer was delivered to Congress: Climate change is real.
So what did Rep. Barton have to say on the issue afterwards?
crickets chirping
…more below the fold…
For some background on the controversy, this ES&T article from last July:
In a letter dated June 23 and sent to three scientists, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) charges that other researchers have found methodological flaws and data errors in their study, which has become known as the hockey-stick paper. Barton also asserts that the researchers have failed to share their raw data and the computer code used in the analysis.
However, scientists familiar with the research say that the hockey-stick paper has already stood up to intense scientific scrutiny and that the raw data are already available. They say that the request is simply politics and is meant to intimidate climate scientists from further linking global warming to human activity.
The hockey-stick paper (Nature 1998, 329, 779-787) became a fundamental part of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) third assessment report, Climate Change 2001. The article and report synthesize 12 data sets–such as the width of tree rings and the isotopic composition of ice cores–to generate a chart of temperature variation in the Northern Hemisphere. Temperatures remain flat before 1900 but then increase, so that the resulting graph looks like a hockey stick Although many scientists point to this analysis and numerous other studies to argue that global warming is real and is caused by human activity, a small group of self-styled skeptics continue to pick away at the science.
Barton’s requests come as a growing number of scientists charge that President Bush has been attempting to make the science on global warming appear uncertain. Rick Piltz, a government employee in the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, recently resigned because White House officials were making excessive changes to the program’s reports.
In letters to Michael Mann, an assistant professor with the department of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, and two of his colleagues, Barton wrote: “Provide the location of all data archives relating to each published study for which you were an author or coauthor.” Barton also asked for curricula vitae, lists of all sources of financial support for research, and the computer code used to generate the hockey-stick analysis.
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) also received a letter from Barton requesting a list of “all grants and all other funding given for research in the area of climate.” The letter also asks for details of any violations concerning the sharing of information and enjoins NSF to describe “in detail how your agency has supported or disseminated the information in the Mann et al. studies.”
According to a staff spokesperson in Barton’s office, who requested anonymity, “the letter is part of an overarching goal of data quality.” When asked whether Barton’s letters might have a chilling effect on scientists, she said, “I don’t know.”
“The thrust and tone of the letters indicates that [Barton] has been advised by someone who does not understand the science,” says John Holdren, a professor of environmental science and public policy at Harvard University and president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
So, the Republican leadership threw a fit, and the scientific community begrudgingly went about redoing their research in order to prove for these skeptics that their methodology was reliable. The answers came in yesterday:
The Earth is warmer today than at any point the last 400 years, and likely the last millennium, a committee convened by the National Academy of Sciences concluded in a report released Thursday.
Congress sought the 155-page analysis of Earth’s past temperatures after a dispute erupted a year ago, when Texas Congressman Joe Barton sharply questioned the methods of Michael Mann and two other researchers, who had published scientific papers stating the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the late 20th century than at any time in the past 1,000 years.
Upon presenting its report to Congress, the scientific panel said its findings generally support the research by Mann and his colleagues.
“It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries,” said Gerald North, the committee’s chairman and an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University.
As for the period from A.D. 1000 to 1600, North said many, but not all locations where temperatures were measured support Mann’s research.
The report appears to deflate some of the objections by global warming skeptics, who have been highly critical of work by Mann and other climate scientists.
Game…Set…Match. Checkmate. Touchdown. Home Run. (insert endless line of sports-themed victory analogies here)
Rep. Barton’s official response:
Barton, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, has said he wants to be sure of the validity of climate change — and that its real cause is human greenhouse gas emissions — before spending money to combat it.
His office referred a request for comment on the new report to the committee Barton chairs.Larry Neal, deputy staff director for the energy committee, noted that only one of the 12 scientific panel members was a statistician, and that what the committee sought was a statistical analysis of Mann’s findings.
Oh, I see…Barton just wanted to be really, really sure that these scientists hadn’t just forgotten to carry the two at some point in their calculations. How nice.
But if this was really the case, why was Barton requesting the funding reports for all of Mann’s climate change work? Maybe he wanted to compare how much these guys were making compared with his researchers:
In his letter, Barton references a February news story in The Wall Street Journal that focused on work by Stephen McIntyre, a former director of several small public mineral exploration companies, who charges that Mann’s Nature article contains methodological flaws and data errors.
According to Barton’s spokesperson, the key arguments in his letter are found in a paper published by McIntyre and McKitrick this year in Energy & Environment–an obscure journal found in only 25 institutions worldwide, according to Journal Citation Reports. Energy & Environment is not included in the Journal Citation Reports list of impact factors for the top 6000 peer-reviewed journals. McIntyre and University of Guelph (Canada) environmental economist Ross McKitrick have also published their critique in Geophysical Research Letters, a peer-reviewed journal (Geophys. Res. Lett. 2005 32 L03710).
McKitrick is also a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, a conservative Canadian think tank that received $60,000 from oil giant ExxonMobil in 2003. In Energy & Environment, McIntyre and McKitrick write that peer review by paleoclimate journals does not compare “with the level of due diligence involved in auditing financial statements or carrying out a feasibility study in mineral development.” They then say that IPCC should not have used Mann’s hockey-stick model without verifying it. In the article, they also claim that Mann will not release the computer source code used in the hockey-stick paper despite “unsuccessful appeals to Nature and the U.S. National Science Foundation.”
Well Rep. Barton can rest easy now, knowing that the research has been proven reliable, and the American people have had their interests served. What’s next for our savior of statistics?
Barton, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, has said he wants to be sure of the validity of climate change — and that its real cause is human greenhouse gas emissions — <u>before spending money to combat it.</u>
Great! I’m glad to know that this report’s release means Barton is finally free to give this research the funding it deserves. It is this kind of courage and leadership that we look for in Congress.
Why don’t you join me in writing, calling, or emailing Rep. Barton to let him know how much we appreciate the fact that he has finally put to rest any doubt on the climate change issue. Make sure to mention his promise to spend money to combat the problem!
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