Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
With respect to the larger issue of climate change, he accused Barton of employing the same tactics
something Waxman would know about, having presided over a series of hearings on the topic in the
1990s.
This time there was a sharper focus on whether the Wegman Report in any way invalidated the
come to the same conclusions using both similar and different data sets and methodologies,”
suggested the motive behind Wegman's social network analysis was somehow to invalidate the
wealth of independent confirmatory studies: “Dr. Wegman … will try to discredit all of these studies
with an un-supported hypothesis questioning the independence of a large group of scientists' work.”
Jay Gulledge pressed the point in his opening statement. Gulledge noted that “the Wegman report
failed to accomplish its primary objective … [it] did not at all assess the merits of the criticisms
directed toward the MBH reconstructions.” He stressed that the Wegman/ McIntyre critique would
only have merit if correcting for any putative errors “yields results significantly different from the
original result that can no longer support the claim of unusual late 20th century warmth.” Gulledge
then took the issue to its logical conclusion, noting that while “the Wegman Report takes no steps to
make such a determination … fortunately, a different group, one well qualified both statistically and
climatologically to tackle this question of merit, had already performed the task several months
before the Wegman Report was released. The study by Wahl and Ammann.” He went on to explain
that that study had both demonstrated the robustness of the MBH hockey stick and the flimsiness of the
criticisms advanced by McIntyre and now the Wegman Report.
Having failed to make any objective scientific case against the hockey stick, Barton and his
colleagues turned instead to insinuation. Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) first quipped
that she “remembered” when she was growing up in the 1960s that climate scientists were worried
about another Ice Age—evidently she hadn't studied her talking points very closely; the claim is
supposed to apply to the
1970s
. She then asserted that supposed flaws in the hockey stick weren't
caught early on because the peer review “was not an independent and separate review outside of” the
replied, “I believe that is the case.” Blackburn could have been naive enough to believe what she was
saying, but I was surprised that Wegman—an academic—would make such a claim. To support it, he
would have to have known who the reviewers of our article were, which was impossible (assuming
that the confidentiality of the review process had not been compromised) because they were
anonymous. And he would have to conclude that
Nature,
one of the world's premier science journals,
was somehow unqualified to select independent and unbiased referees. The whole argument was
preposterous; and more than anything else it spoke to the intellectually bankrupt nature of the attack
against us.
The final line of the attack involved once again criticizing us for a supposed lack of openness
with regard to the way we conducted the MBH98 and MBH99 studies. I pointed out that the allegation
that we had not released our data was simply false, while the criticisms against us for not initially
publishing our computer code were at best disingenuous, since the NSF had already established that
such materials were considered proprietary, and independent researchers had implemented our
algorithm and confirmed our results without it.
40
This line of attack—criticizing my coauthors and me for a supposed lack of scientific openness
