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increase understanding among the audience of policy makers in front of me that made me feel as if
there was at least some silver lining in having participated in the hearing.
Midway through the hearing, Jeffords dropped a bombshell. He announced that his staff had
received a note from Hans Von Storch announcing his resignation as chief editor of the journal
Climate Research
, in protest over the publication of the Soon and Baliunas paper. Von Storch was no
scientific ally of mine. Indeed, as may be recalled, he and I had had disputes in the past regarding the
relative merits of statistical climate reconstruction methods. But ally or not, Von Storch was outraged
that such a transparently flawed paper had been published in his journal. His note, which Jeffords
read aloud, was to the point: “My view … is that the review of the Soon et al. paper failed to detect
significant methodological flaws in the paper…. The paper should not have been published in this
forum, not because of the eventual conclusion, but because of the insufficient evidence to draw this
conclusion.”
Von Storch's resignation had been precipitated by the refusal of the journal's publisher, Otto
Kinne, to allow him to publish an editorial expressing his view that the peer review process had
clearly failed with the Soon and Baliunas paper.
37
Several other editors quit as well (ultimately six
editors—half the editorial board—would quit in protest over the incident).
38
Despite the devastating
development, Legates and Soon continued to defend the study at the hearing. Legates suggested that
the editor who handled the paper, Chris de Freitas, was being unfairly criticized for what Legates
argued was entirely normal editorial practice. When asked to respond by Jeffords, I pointed out not
only that de Freitas had a highly controversial track record in his editorial decision making, but also
that “my understanding is that Chris de Freitas, the individual in question, frequently publishes op-ed
pieces in newspapers in New Zealand attacking IPCC and attacking Kyoto and attacking the work of
mainstream climatologists…. So this is a fairly unusual editor that we are talking about.”
Despite the “tag-team” approach I was up against, I felt good about how the hearing went.
Science seemed to have prevailed that day. When I stepped out of the hearing room, a swarm of
journalists, staffers, and others surrounded me for comment on the affair. Among other things, I
pointed out that the intellectual bankruptcy of the climate change denial campaign had been in full
display in that hearing.
There would be further aftermath to the hearing, including my first taste of the sort of campaign
that would become part and parcel of the attacks against my coauthors and me. De Freitas and the
climatologist John Christy wrote letters of complaint to President John Casteen of the University of
Virginia (where I was then teaching), claiming that I had unfairly maligned them in my Senate
testimony.
39
In my letter of response to Casteen, I refuted Christy's claim that I referred to his work as having
been “debunked.” It was quite clear by context that I had been referring not to Dr. Christy's work, but
to the myth perpetuated by “climate change contrarians” that the satellite evidence he had analyzed in
some way contradicted surface evidence of warming. This myth had indeed been dispelled or
debunked in a National Academy of Science report published in 2000.
40
With regard to de Freitas, who had claimed that I damaged his reputation, I pointed out that that
there was nothing in my testimony that was either untrue or unfair. De Freitas's advocacy against
policies to restrict carbon emissions and his frequent attacks against the IPCC made him a highly
unusual editor for an academic journal. It was hardly my fault that his actions had led the editor in
chief and half the editorial board to resign from the journal in protest. Nor was it my doing that
