Say It Ain’t So, (Smokey) Joe! - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 108

retired mining executive, neither of whom are climate scientists and whose claims have been widely
contradicted by respected experts.” Had “the Committee asked those Canadians questions about their
work?” Boehlert asked, and then answered: “No…. What this is all about is a threat to the open
pursuit of science.”
Boehlert's passionate objections to Barton's actions were apparently contagious. By the end of
August, a second prominent Republican, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), had entered the fray,
denouncing Barton's actions in similarly blunt terms in a letter to the Chronicle of Higher
Education. 22 “Scientists must be allowed to conduct their work unfettered by political or commercial
pressures,” McCain said, drawing an only thinly veiled comparison between Barton's actions and
Lysenkoism, “We have only to look at the failures of biological science in the former Soviet Union to
understand the scientific and political costs of interference.” McCain went on: “[T]he message sent
by the Congressional committee to the three scientists was not subtle: Publish politically unpalatable
scientific results and brace yourself for political retribution, which might include denial of the
opportunity to compete for federal funds.” 23
We Reply
My coauthors Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes and I provided our own formal responses to
Barton's letter on July 14, 2005. 24 Each of us made some of the same basic points. We noted that the
findings of our own specific published studies (MBH98 and MBH99) had been independently
replicated by other scientists using the available data and algorithm description, and that numerous
studies since (nearly a dozen, in fact!) using different types of proxy data and alternative statistical
methods had confirmed our key conclusion: that it is likely that the late twentieth century is the
warmest period of at least the past one thousand years. We also noted that all of those studies are just
one small piece of evidence in a solid scientific case that humans are now altering the climate, a case
that has been established entirely independently of any paleoclimate evidence.
The tone of Ray Bradley's letter was dismissive, but witty. He began: “It is good to know that
your committee is keenly interested in understanding the basis for President George Bush's recent
statement [that] '… the surface of the Earth is warmer and [that] an increase in greenhouse gases
caused by humans is contributing to the problem.'” After describing to Barton and Whitfield how
science is actually done and how scientific knowledge actually advances, Ray explained that “it does
not move forward through editorials or articles in the Wall Street Journal … it does not advance
through ad hominem attacks on individual scientists in the Congress of the United States.”
Malcolm Hughes took a somewhat more deferential tack in his letter, gently pointing out the
erroneous nature of Barton's various assertions, and ending with a cordial invitation: “Our university
is a major center of research on past environments and, should you ever have the opportunity to visit
Tucson, we would be pleased to give you an introduction to the wide and fascinating range of work
being done here.”
As I was the primary object of attack, I took the matter somewhat more seriously. 25 In the
process of crafting my response, I consulted with authorities kind enough to provide me legal advice,
on a pro bono basis, as to what rights I had in the face of a hostile attack by a congressman. David
Vladeck of Georgetown University Law School, a leading legal scholar who had argued several