Jim Sensenbrenner (Official photo)
In the wake of the "Climate-gate" controversy over the CRU Archive and its contents, several prominent Republicans in the House and Senate have called the entire premise of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) into serious question. Congressional Democrats, Obama administration officials, and their allies in the scientific community continue to minimize the affair and insist that AGW is no less real for all the disclosures.
The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a contentious hearing yesterday. NOAA chief administrator Jane Lubchenco and White House Science Czar John Holdren were called to testify. Predictably, Representative F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI-5), the ranking member, challenged both witnesses with multiple excerpts from the CRU e-mails, and also challenged Holdren specifically on his lengthy exchange with Nick Schultz of Tech Central Station concerning Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, who had shown in their paper in Climate Research that sunspot activity correlated well with the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA). (Sensenbrenner did not, according to the AP account, read excerpts from that e-mail, but offered a summary of Holdren's mocking discussion of the two climatologists.) Equally predictably, Holdren and Lubchenco, aided by committee Democrats, dismissed the e-mails as irrelevant to the question, apparently still real to them, of AGW and its deleterious effects.
In related news, several Republican members of the House and Senate have written letters to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Secretaries of Energy and Commerce, asking them to suspend certain regulatory and other findings that would treat carbon dioxide (CO2) as a pollutant. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has already formally rejected one such letter by Senator James M. Inhofe (R-OK).
The Republicans, especially at the Global Warming hearing, did not appear prepared with the sort of evidence that would most severely weaken the arguments presented to them by the two administration witnesses. At one point, Lubchenco gave a high-school-level demonstration involving adding dry ice (CO2 as solid) to water and then adding chalk to the resulting carbonic-acid solution to suggest that shellfish would suffer the dissolution of their shells in an acidified ocean, as the chalk dissolved in the dry-ice solution. The Republicans did not attack this directly, as they could have. Two days ago Anthony Watts of WattsUpWithThat posted this entry detailing a press release that very day by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), showing that many shellfish demonstrate a remarkable ability to add to their shells in a carbonated marine environment, rather than merely allowing their shells to dissolve, as WHOI had feared four years ago. WHOI now appears to find the evidence in favor of Lubchenco's proposition inconclusive at best, and their fear now is simply that the ocean's ecosystem would re-stabilize in a state not to their liking, not that the oceans would be somehow sterilized. Why Lubchenco, a marine biologist herself, would be unaware of these latest findings, and thus present such a weak argument, is unclear. But why Congressman Sensenbrenner would not have known it either, is perhaps less clear.
Instead of responding to the witness' arguments directly, the Republicans chose to challenge the witnesses with the e-mails. Summing up, Sensenbrenner said:
These e-mails show a pattern of suppression, manipulation and secrecy that was inspired by ideology, condescension and profit.
Sensenbrenner made free especially with Phil Jones' remarks in 1999 about "Mike's Nature trick" to "hide the decline," and with another quote by Jones:
I would like to see the climate change happen so the science could be proved right.
Holdren attempted to defend Jones against the adverse connotations of his remarks, saying for example that Jones' use of the word "trick" was an unfortunate choice of phrase to connote "a clever way" to deal with a problem of data presentation.
Sensenbrenner also dwelt at length on the work of Michael E. Mann, of Hockey Stick fame, whose work is now under review at Penn State University, his current employer. He and Dr. Holdren had a dispute over the interpretation of a National Academy of Sciences report on Mann's work. Neither man mentioned the Wegman Report, which slammed Mann's hockey-stick hypothesis in no uncertain terms.
Note: much of this report relies on a dispatch by Associated Press writer Seth Borenstein. He has evidently covered the "AGW beat" for years, and the Climate Depot site has taken him to task as recently as August of 2009 for reporting that, according to Climate Depot, is of dubious quality.
Separately, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has responded rather sarcastically to Senator Inhofe's call for an investigation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She has called the release of the CRU Archive "a crime" and suggested that the releaser of the Archive should be prosecuted.
You call it "Climategate"; I call it "E-mail-theft-gate." Whatever it is, the main issue is, Are we facing global warming or are we not? I'm looking at these e-mails, that, even though they were stolen, are now out in the public.
Commentary on an article at The Hill online about Boxer's statement has been heavy and often scathing. Boxer appears to assume that the releaser was an outsider. If the releaser were instead an insider, then he would be protected under UK employment law by the Public Disclosure Act of 1998. (And if the file was carelessly left on a public server long enough for the releaser to take it, then the CRU staff have none to blame but themselves.)
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