The Battle of the Bulge - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 136

with Inhofe's help, it demanded that the EPA reopen the public comment period based on an
accusation that the raw data upon which the evidence for climate change was based had been
destroyed. The matter in question was the loss several decades earlier of some old hard-copy
documents describing a modest number of thermometer records from one institution, the Climatic
Research Unit (CRU) in the United Kingdom. All the raw data were in fact still available, and
several independent scientific groups had produced an instrumental temperature record nearly
identical to CRU's. In no way, furthermore, did the instrumental temperature record, let alone EPA's
endangerment finding, hinge on the CRU data. As climate policy expert Rick Piltz put it, CEI, driven
by an “antiregulatory ideology” was now simply “grasping at straws.” 15
Other efforts to undermine the case for the reality of climate change were afoot. That summer, a
small number of climate change deniers within the physics community attempted to force the largest
professional society in the field of physics—the American Physical Society (APS)—to reverse its
position on climate change. The effort was spearheaded by none other than S. Fred Singer, joined by
Will Happer, a prominent denier in the Princeton physics department and chairman of the board of the
George C. Marshall Institute—the same group that Frederick Seitz used during the 1990s to wage his
attack against the science of global warming. 16 Singer and Happer were joined by two of Happer's
Princeton colleagues as well as by Roger Cohen, ExxonMobil's retired manager for strategic
planning, and one other physicist.
The group of six brandished a petition signed by fifty-four physicists demanding that the APS
reconsider its November 2007 policy statement affirming the reality of human-caused climate change.
For some perspective, fifty-four is but one half of one percent of the APS, and smaller than the
number of faculty members in the physics department at my own institution, Penn State University.
The unimpressively small number didn't stop the Wall Street Journal from immediately seizing upon
the development in a June 2009 editorial subtitled “The Number of Skeptics Is Swelling
Everywhere.” 17 APS President Cherry Murray appointed a high-level subcommittee of the APS to
consider whether any changes in the policy statement were warranted, something that any responsible
head of an organization would do under the circumstances. By early November, the subcommittee had
rendered a decision; it rejected the petition. Nonetheless, the climate change deniers had already
gotten quite a bit of mileage out of the repeated claim that a large group of physicists supposedly
denied the reality of climate change.
The rhetoric that climate change deniers were using was at the same time growing increasingly
inflammatory. In early October 2009, for example, commentator Marc Sheppard attacked climate
scientists as “lying perpetrators of fraud” in “UN Climate Reports: They Lie,” a piece he wrote for a
Web site called, without irony, the American Thinker. 18 Just one month earlier, South Carolina
Congressman Joe Wilson had shouted out “You lie!” during President Barack Obama's address to
Congress. Wilson's outburst was widely condemned as an unprecedented breach of congressional
etiquette and a sign of the disappearance of good faith in the discourse over public policy. The use of
identical rhetoric by climate change deniers signaled a further disappearance of any residual good
faith that might have remained in the climate change debate.
When in Doubt, Play Hockey