Hockey Stick Goes to Washington - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 81

“Leading Climate Scientists Reaffirm View That Late 20th Century Warming Was Unusual and
Resulted from Human Activity” in early July 2003, just prior to the article's publication.
Nevertheless, the Soon and Baliunas study was immediately taken up by the U.S. Senate's leading
climate change denier, Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma.
The Single Greatest Hoax Ever Perpetrated
Climate change is “the single greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public,” exclaimed
James Inhofe on the U.S. Senate floor in January 2005. 30 Personally, I thought Mr. Inhofe was paying
my colleagues and me a tremendous compliment. After all, if thousands of highly opinionated and
frequently cantankerous climate scientists had indeed conspired not only to coordinate such an
elaborate hoax, but to get the ice sheets, sea level, and ocean temperatures to play along, we were
certainly far more impressive a bunch than anyone had ever acknowledged.
The leading recipient of oil and gas money in the U.S. Senate at the time, 31 Inhofe now took the
baton from Phil Cooney and the Bush White House CEQ. As head of the Senate Environment and
Public Works (EPW) committee, he held a hearing in July 2003 aimed at calling the entire science of
climate change into question based simply on the Soon and Baliunas study. As the Republicans held
the majority, Inhofe largely controlled which witnesses were invited to testify. Of three witnesses, he
would call two. The minority, led by Jim Jeffords of Vermont (an independent who caucused with
Democrats), would get to call one—and they chose me. Inhofe chose Willie Soon as one of the two
majority witnesses. 32 His second witness was a Soon and Baliunas coauthor on the Energy and
Environment version of the paper, David Legates of the University of Delaware, yet another climate
change contrarian with fossil fuel industry ties. 33
The hearing took place on July 29, 2003, one day after Inhofe gave an extended speech about
climate change and science on the Senate floor. In those remarks, Inhofe trotted out the “scientists
were predicting cooling in the 1970s” canard we encountered in previous chapters. He
misrepresented the work and views of several prominent climate scientists, including James Hansen,
Stephen Schneider, and Tom Wigley. 34 He also unveiled his latest line of attack, the claim that the
Soon and Baliunas study had discredited the hockey stick—the subject of the next day's hearing.
I dressed in my best suit for the hearing. I had been corresponding with members of the minority
staff as I drafted my opening statement and gathered materials for my testimony, and I felt well
prepared for what was to come. I was seated facing the EPW committee, which included chair Inhofe,
ranking member Jeffords, Wayne Allard (R-CO), Tom Carper (D-DE), Hilary Clinton (D-NY), John
Cornyn (R-TX), Craig Thomas (R-WY), and George Voinovich (R-OH). Soon and Legates sat on
either side of me.
As expected, Soon and Legates used the hearing to promote the claims of their study. I, in turn,
was more than happy to oblige in detailing the fundamental flaws in that study. When asked by Inhofe
what I thought of a table he presented summarizing the Soon and Baliunas claims, my assessment was
blunt: “just about everything there is incorrect.” In response to a follow-up question from Jeffords, I
elaborated: “They got just about everything wrong. They did not select the proxies properly. They did
not actually analyze any data. They did not produce a reconstruction. They did not produce
uncertainties in a reconstruction. They did not compare to the proper baseline of the late-20th