It's Getting Hot in Herre

The NYTimes editorial board lead on Saturday with the following warning over congressional intimidation of scientists who are warning of the increasing evidence of climate change/global warming:

It's going to be hard enough to find common political ground on global warming without the likes of Representative Joe Barton harassing reputable scientists who helped alert the world to the problem in the first place. Mr. Barton is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and thus has great influence over energy strategy, which badly needs updating to address issues like warming. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Mr. Barton has also been a leading beneficiary of campaign funds from the oil, gas and utility industries, which have belittled the warming threat and resisted regulatory efforts to control the burning of fossil fuels. Mainstream scientists believe such fuels are responsible for the warming trend in the last century. Mr. Barton, a Texas Republican, has zeroed in on three climatologists - Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes - who have presented influential data showing a sharp rise in global temperatures in recent decades. Their conclusions have never been convincingly challenged, and indeed have received strong support from other researchers taking different analytical paths. Nevertheless, Mr. Barton has peppered the three scientists and the National Science Foundation, which underwrote some of their research, with endless demands for documentation, including, in the foundation's case, checks and bank statements. A Barton spokesman says such requests are a "common exercise" of committee responsibility. But Sherwood Boehlert of New York - a fellow Republican who is chairman of the House Science Committee and an enlightened moderate on environmental issues - seemed much closer to the truth when he described Mr. Barton's inquisition as "an effort to intimidate scientists rather than learn from them, and to substitute Congressional political review for scientific peer review."

The Bush Greenwatch web site (from which you can also sign up for occasional news items sent to your email inbox) has some more details:

At issue is research conducted mainly by Michael Mann, an assistant professor in the department of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. Mann's "hockey stick study," as it is known in the field, shows that global temperatures were relatively stable up until 1900, when the planet suddenly warmed dramatically: on a graph the upward spike looks like a hockey stick. [2] Many scientists cite this study to confirm that global warming exists, and is abetted by human activity. The Mann paper played an integral role in a 2001 report by the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Despite the fact that the paper has undergone intensive peer review and is widely regarded as a fundamental study on climate change, Barton has called for all the raw data and the computer code Mann used in his study. Growing numbers within the scientific community assert that Barton is not actually interested in assessing how Mann reached his conclusions. Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told BushGreenwatch, "Barton's request does not reflect an effort to further understand the science, but an attempt to discredit the IPCC report." [...] In the letter requesting raw data from Mann, Barton predicates his skepticism of Mann's results on a February article in the Wall Street Journal, which cites the work of Stephen McIntyre, a former director of several mineral exploration companies, and economist Ross McKitrick. [3] McIntyre and McKitrick claim that Mann's study is rife with methodological errors and data flaws. McIntyre and McKitrick's dispute with Mann's work was published in a little-known journal called Energy & Environment, which according to Journal Citation Reports is found at only 25 institutions worldwide, and is not included on the Journal Citation Reports list of impact factors for the top 6,000 peer-reviewed journals. The article was also published in Geophysical Research Letters. McIntyre and McKitrick's study has received substantial criticism from several prominent climate scientists. NASA's Schmidt told BushGreenwatch, "Most of their study has been shown to be wrong or irrelevant." McKitrick is a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, a free-market oriented Canadian think tank that received $60,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003. [4] Both McIntyre and McKitrick are listed as "experts" for the George C. Marshall institute, which has received $515,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. [5] SOURCES: [1] Rep. Joe Barton's website. [2] "Congressman unmoved by peer review, asks to see raw data," Environmental Science & Technology Online News, Jul. 6, 2005. [3] Barton website, op. cit. [4] Fact Sheet: Fraser Institute, Exxonsecrets.org. [5] Fact Sheet: George C. Marshall Institute, Exxonsecrets.org.

Back to the NYTimes editorial, they offer up Senator Pete Domenici as a skeptic who has turned the corner:

Mr. Barton's antics make one all the more grateful for the more responsible attitude displayed in the Senate, particularly by Pete Domenici, a conservative senator from New Mexico. A longtime global warming skeptic, Mr. Domenici has been open to new information, read the literature on the subject and accepted the need for mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions. On Thursday, Mr. Domenici took time out from the energy bill negotiations to hold the first in a series of hearings intended to lead to meaningful and politically acceptable emissions controls.

Props to Pete, but I wish his Senate web site had a choice for "Environment" in his front-page poll asking, "Which issue is your biggest priority?"