Chronicle of Higher Education - web daily - July 1, 2005
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.
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.
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. 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 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 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."
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.
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.
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.
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, RealClimate <http://www.realclimate.org/> and Climate Audit <http://www.climateaudit.org/>.
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 did not respond to an e-mail message requesting an interview for this article. 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.
Several scientists said the request from Mr. Barton reads as if it were written by Mr. McIntyre. "This is a very peculiar thing," Mr. Crowley said, "because Barton is basically a mouthpiece for a Canadian citizen who is requesting this."
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 (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."