| GLOBAL WARMING AND POLITICAL INTIMIDATION How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists as the Earth Heated Up Raymond S. Bradley Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-55849-868-6 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-55849-868-0 | 167pp. | SC/GSI | $21.95 | |
Ray Bradley was on vacation with his wife, Jane, when the letter was sent. Leaving southwestern France on La Via de los Peregriños — the Pilgrim Trail — they hiked over the Pyrenees and stopped at a hotel in Bilbao. Checking e-mail there, he realized that something was going on. But he couldn't sort it out until he got back to Amherst and could download the attachments to the e-mails. He found a letter from the House Energy Committee, signed by Joe Barton of Texas, chair of the committee. Barton demanded the following:
It is highly irregular for a congressional panel to investigate a single scientific paper at all, much less to this degree. Not only is it political meddling with scientific research, but — probing as it does into the entire careers of the three scientists, including their financial affairs (even honoraria given for speeches) — it smacks of a criminal investigation.
Dr. Bradley is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and Director of the Climate System Research Center there. In addition to his numerous articles and scientific papers (a long, long list), he has written or edited 13 books.
On 6 July 2014 it was announced that he won the Roy J. Zuckerberg Endowed Leadership Award "in recognition of his courage, conviction and selflessness in devoting his time and talent to helping the University of Massachusetts to accomplish its goals."
Bradley did respond (as did Mann and Hughes). He reproduces his response in the book. I consider it appropriate, if a little too mild. (Mann's was more combative, as you might expect.) The travesty of Barton's action was immediately countered by other members of Congress, most notably by Sherwood Boehlert, Republican of New York. American scientific organizations quickly added their weight in opposition. Barton, however, was not finished. He commissioned a probe into the statistical methodology used in MBH98 and MBH99, and into the "social network" of the three scientists. This was led by statistician Edward Wegner, who later was found to have plagiarized a large part of his report.1 That report found significant flaws in the work of Mann et al. — in sharp contrast to a concurrent National Research Council study commissioned by Boehlert, which vindicated their work.
I won't spend more time here on rehashing this controversy.2 Over the ensuing sixteen years, a number of independent researchers have published examinations of climate proxy records for the period Mann et al. first investigated. They all find substantially the same upward spike in temperatures following the year 1950. I would say that, from any rational perspective, the case is closed.
In retrospect, it seems remarkable that our hockey stick study would have generated a political backlash, but such were the stakes. Concern was mounting that the public might actually wake up and demand legislative action that would limit energy consumption and associated profits for the energy industry. The hockey stick graph was chosen as the sacrificial lamb. Our antagonists seemed to believe that if they could refute our study, the entire edifice of global warming science would crumble and fall. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as concern over global warming rests on a vast array of scientific evidence, of which the hockey stick is but a miniscule part. The fact that our critics seized on this particular study to launch their attack simply underlines their ignorance about the essential facts. If we had never published the graph, the issue of global warming would be no less urgent or compelling. But this incident became much larger than the attack on our integrity; it engaged politics and science in a head-to-head battle that threatened the very nature of the way scientific research is conducted (and supported) in the United States. This was quickly recognized by numerous scientific organizations, which weighed in not to defend our result but to defend the way in which science proceeds—driven not by political expediency but by critical scientific evaluation over many years. – Page 4 |
The lesson we should take from this is the one Bradley points out: politics must stay separate from science.
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