A Tale of Two Reports - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 119

WAXMAN: Thank you. I want to ask Dr. Christy about this because you stated that you provided your
computer code to other researchers when it has been requested, and you specifically mentioned
providing your code to Remote Sensing Systems or RSS. Is that accurate?
CHRISTY: We provide[d] the part of the code that was in question.
WAXMAN: Well, I contacted RSS about your testimony and Mr. Frank Wentz sent me a letter last night,
and he wrote to say, “Dr. Christy has never been willing to share his computer code in a
substantial way,” and he provides the text of a 2002 e-mail exchange between RSS and yourself.
And according to this letter when asked for your code, you replied, “I don't see how sharing
code would be helpful because there are at least seven programs that are executed (several
thousands lines of code) and we would be forced to spend a considerable amount of time trying
to explain coding issues of the spaghetti we wrote.” In light of this letter, Dr. Christy, I would be
interested if you care to clarify your testimony because Mr. Wentz wrote further, “I think the
complexity issue was a red herring. My interpretation of Dr. Christy's response is he simply
didn't want us looking over his shoulder, possibly discovering errors in his work. So we had to
take a more tedious trial-and-error approach to uncovering the errors in his methods …” What
do you say about that? That sounds inconsistent with what you have told us. 42
If Christy had been invited to testify by Barton's staff, he ended up being the unintended star
witness for the “defense” rather than the “prosecution.” This exchange didn't settle the underlying
arguments over source code release, which requires some balance between intellectual property
rights and scientific access and is still being debated today. 43 It did, however, demonstrate the
hypocrisy of climate change deniers pretending to occupy the moral high ground on this issue.
Waxman lobbed a series of softball questions that served to discredit the case advanced by
Barton and his sympathizers. He asked me to correct a number of serious misconceptions betrayed by
Wegman's previous testimony. These involved Wegman's apparent lack of awareness of basic climate
science principles such as the greenhouse effect and the nature of greenhouse gases, 44 his
misunderstanding of the distinction between natural and human-caused climate change, 45 and his
perplexing claim that future human impact on the climate will be both negligible and harmless. 46
Wegman's plea for greater involvement of statisticians in climate studies, as I pointed out in follow-
up testimony, was also disingenuous, given the history of more than a decade of close collaboration
between climate scientists and statisticians. 47
Waxman also gave me an opportunity to correct Wegman's mischaracterizations of my own
work, in particular his claim that my colleagues and I had “circled the wagons” with respect to our
work in this field. I pointed out that we had contributed to fundamental advances in the field of
paleoclimate reconstruction in the decade since we had begun our original work, developing and
applying new techniques such as the more sophisticated “regularized expectation-maximization
method” and testing them rigorously using climate model simulations. Finally, given the evidence that
emerged that Wegman had collaborated closely with Stephen McIntyre in preparing his report,
Waxman wondered if Wegman had ever made even a single effort to contact me. The answer was no.
There were some lighter moments at the hearing. Jay Inslee (D-WA) asked Ralph Cicerone to
ponder a sort of It's a Wonderful Life scenario with me as the George Bailey character, posing the
rhetorical question of whether the evidence regarding the reality of human-caused climate change