Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
warming.” … We plan to begin to refer to this study in Administration communications on
the science of global climate change; in fact, CEQ just inserted a reference to it in the final
draft chapter on global climate change contained in EPA's first “State of the Environment”
report.… With both the National Academy and IPCC … holding that the 20th Century is the
warmest of the past thousand years, this recent study … represents an opening to potentially
invigorate debate on the actual climate history of the past 1000 years and whether that
history reinforces or detracts from our level of confidence regarding the potential human
influence on global climate change.
Cooney, in short, saw fit to reject the consensus of rigorous national and international scientific
assessments by the IPCC and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences based on a single study funded
by his former fossil fuel lobbying organization.
It was only later, after this information had made its way into the public domain in late 2007, that
I was able to piece together certain odd and seemingly unconnected events from 2003. I'd had a
series of exchanges in April 2003 with David Halpern, a senior policy analyst for the Office of
Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the unit within the White House that coordinates the
president's science policy agenda. I had dealt with the OSTP before, in late 1999 in the lead-up to
Bill Clinton's mention of our hockey stick conclusions in his January 2000 State of the Union address.
But this wasn't the Clinton OSTP; it was the Bush OSTP. Halpern came right to the point, making no
secret of the fact that Vice President Cheney's office was intrigued by the recent Soon and Baliunas
study. Halpern was interested in what I thought of it and what my response was to the claims made in
the study, especially the explicit and implicit criticisms of past paleoclimate research that included
my own work. My exchanges with Halpern, it turns out, coincided in timing with Cooney's April 21
memo to Cheney's office.
I might have been more worried by ulterior motives in this inquiry, but Halpern was not just any
political operative. He was a respected oceanographer and climate scientist from the NASA Jet
Propulsion Laboratory who had published seminal research on the physics underlying the El Niño
phenomenon and now had taken an advisory position within OSTP. He also happens to have been the
editor who handled the very first article I submitted in the field of climate science, a paper in the
early 1990s that, like much of my earlier work, dealt with natural climate variability.
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I was relieved
that Halpern was directly involved in this affair, not because I felt he would be somehow politically
sympathetic, but simply because he was a member of the scientific community, and one who was quite
familiar with climate science. We shared a common language, and this made it easier to communicate
my views on the matters in question.
The Paper That Launched a Half-Dozen Resignations
So what was the Soon and Baliunas paper that was getting so much attention within the Bush
administration? Sallie Baliunas, the more senior author, completed her Ph.D. in astrophysics at
Harvard in 1980. She stayed on as a staff scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics, an institute loosely associated with Harvard University. Her best-known scientific
contribution in the area of climate was her work with solar physicist, founder of NASA GISS, and
