Democrats call for information from seven climate testifiers’ universities
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8103
Democratic members of Congress are demanding information about researchers who have testified against scientists’ climate consensus in Congress. In response, and with mixed clichés, a combination of the offended testifiers and outraged conservative media pundits is charging “witch hunt,” neo-McCarthyism, and in at least one case, Lysenkoism . Representatives of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Association of University Professors, and the Union of Concerned Scientists agree that the demands for information justify at least some concern for academic freedom.
The New York Times incited this climate-science street fight in a Sunday, 22 February, front-page article above the fold. Members of Congress widened it. The conflict escalated still further a few days later, when conservatives struck back in kind.
“Street fight”? For climate technopolitical strife, Nature introduced that cliché in a 2010 editorial ‘s subheadline. The editorial urged scientists to “inform policy-makers about the underlying science and the potential consequences of policy decisions—while making sure they are not bested in the court of public opinion.” Later, Nature headlined a commentary “How to beat the media in the climate street fight.”
The present fight began when the Times charged that the inveterate climate-consensus scoffer Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon—an aerospace engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics “who claims that variations in the Sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming"—has accepted “more than $1.2 million . . . from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers.” Breitbart.com called the report a “smear.”
Within a day of the Times piece, the Boston Globe was reporting that Senator Edward J. Markey (D-MA) was “calling on coal and oil companies to reveal whether they are funding scientific climate change studies.” The Globe quoted the senator: “The American public deserve an honest debate that isn’t polluted by the best junk science fossil fuel interests can buy.”
By midweek, another New York Times article had summarized developments:
In letters sent to seven universities on Tuesday, Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat who is the ranking member of the House committee on natural resources, sent detailed requests to the academic employers of scientists who had testified before Congress about climate change.
The requests focused on funding sources for the scientists, including David Legates of the University of Delaware and Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
In the letters, Representative Grijalva wrote, “My colleagues and I cannot perform our duties if research or testimony provided to us is influenced by undisclosed financial relationships.” He asked for each university’s policies on financial disclosure and the amount and sources of outside funding for each scholar, “communications regarding the funding” and “all drafts” of testimony.
Three Democratic members of the Senate sent 100 letters to fossil fuel companies, trade groups and other organizations asking about their funding of climate research and advocacy. The letters were signed by Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, Barbara Boxer of California and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
Vociferous objections ensued.
National Review editor Rich Lowry published the Politico commentary “A shameful climate witch hunt,” complaining that “the assumption of Grijalva’s fishing expedition is that anyone who questions global-warming orthodoxy is a greedy tool of Big Oil and must be harried in the name of planetary justice and survival.” The harriers’ attitude, Lowry charged, calls to mind Trofim Lysenko, “the high priest of the Soviet Union’s politicized science.”
A piece headlined “Dem. congressman on witch hunt against climate scientists ” appeared at the Weekly Standard, which later also posted “The Democratic war on science .” The first called Grijalva’s behavior “appalling for anyone who believes in open and honest scientific debate.” The second condemned Democrats for “abusing their power to try to dig up any information they can use to discredit these scientists and silence debate over the necessity of draconian government action to deal with climate change.”
Both Weekly Standard pieces brought up a comparison that has been common in the current street fight. They contrasted the present situation with former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli’s attempts to get information about the work of former University of Virginia climate researcher Michael Mann. Both pieces suggested that the media are applying a double standard. Both called the media irresponsibly inattentive to the street fight.
At the Financial Post, the business section of Canada’s National Post, editor Terence Corcoran figured centrally in the recent libel case Corcoran vs. Weaver, in which a ruling against Corcoran and his colleagues declared that journalists must not treat a scientist as “unavoidable road kill on the highway of public controversy.” In the present street fight, Corcoran published “The last climate science witch hunt .” Alleging that the street fight has been “clearly a coordinated effort,” he wrote:
It must be getting cold in the climate science greenhouse, so cold the denizens have taken to hunting witches and burning them to keep their theories of climate change alive. The science is said to be settled, with 97% of the world’s thousands of scientists allegedly in agreement that the world is on the brink of a man-made global warming catastrophe. But 97% isn’t enough, apparently. Despite their claim to an overpowering position, the climate establishment and activists have been forced to begin a public purge of the half dozen US scientists who hold different views.
The Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry is one of the seven targeted testifiers. On her blog she declared , “It looks like it is ‘open season’ on anyone who deviates even slightly from the consensus.” She added, “The political motivations of all this are apparent from barackobama.com: Call out the climate deniers .”
Curry expressed puzzlement about the congressional information demands:
I think Grijalva has made a really big mistake in doing this. I am wondering on what authority Grijalva is demanding this information? He is ranking minority member of a committee before which I have never testified. Do his colleagues in the Democratic Party support his actions? Are they worried about backlash from the Republicans, in going after Democrat witnesses?
I don’t think anything good will come of this. I anticipate that Grijalva will not find any kind of an undisclosed fossil fuel smoking gun from any of the 7 individuals under investigation.
A year ago Curry and two more of the targeted testifiers—John Christy of the University of Alabama and Richard Lindzen of MIT—participated as invitees in an American Physical Society meeting to discuss possible revision of APS’s official statement on climate change. The chairman, Steve Koonin, a high-visibility public figure in physics for decades, later contributed the Wall Street Journal op-ed “Climate science is not settled .”
Another of the seven, Steven Hayward, joined several observers who have invoked civic memory of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, named for the late communist-hunting Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. Hayward’s Power Line posting’s headline slightly rephrased a famous question from those days: “Are you now or have you ever been a climate skeptic? ” Hayward deplores the actions of “Rep. Grijalva and his McCarthyite witch hunters” and “the absolute ritual conformity demanded by the climate cult today.”
Another Power Line blogger, Scott Johnson, focused on media treatment of political left and right concerning climate by asking a question about the first two words of the left-leaning Washington Post‘s headline “House Dems: Did Big Oil seek to sway scientists in climate debate?” Johnson wrote:
If we were talking “House GOP,” that’s not how [the Post‘s] story would read. The story would seek responses from the targets of the inquiry. The story would note the unusual nature of the correspondence. The story would ask what is really going on here. The story would intimate the underlying threat to academic freedom.
Johnson summarized, “How would the mainstream media react if a Republican congressman lobbed threatening inquiries hounding seven university presidents regarding the funding of professors’ research? They would recall the ghost of McCarthyism.”
Roger Pielke Jr, another of the seven, began his own blog posting with an image of McCarthy. Pielke concluded his posting with sentences that have been widely quoted: “When ‘witch hunts’ are deemed legitimate in the context of popular causes, we will have fully turned science into just another arena for the exercise of power politics. The result is a big loss for both science and politics.”
He and many others have pointed out that ironically, far from opposing the climate consensus overall, Pielke substantially supports it, though with important reservations. He asks: “What am I accused of that prompts being investigated?” Quoting Grijalva, he answers:
Here is my crime: “Prof. Roger Pielke, Jr., at CU’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research has testified numerous times before the US Congress on climate change and its economic impacts. His 2013 Senate testimony featured the claim, often repeated, that it is ‘incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.’”
Pielke calls the charge that he’s a climate skeptic “a lie.” Some of the vociferous objections to the information demands have focused on his uniqueness among the seven targeted testifiers. Investors Business Daily posted “Global warming McCarthyites are even targeting believers .” The American Thinker‘s headline announced, “Climate scientist being investigated by Congress for not believing in global warming enough .” At Breitbart.com, it was “Climate scientist targeted by Democrats for global-warming apostasy .” The Daily Caller’s headline picked up on the new resolve that Pielke announced concerning his participation in climate science: “Dem ‘witch hunt’ forces scientist out of global warming research .”
Grijalva has posted online his letters to university presidents concerning each of the seven targets: David Legates, University of Delaware; John Christy, Alabama; Judith Curry, Georgia Tech; Richard Lindzen, MIT; Robert Balling, Arizona State University; Roger Pielke Jr, Colorado; and Steven Hayward, Pepperdine University. To what extent should these letters trouble supporters of academic freedom?
According to a report in National Journal, Joanne Carney of AAAS said she understands the concerns about Soon’s funding sources but is “skeptical of Grijalva’s letters.” The article quotes her:
“I think we are questioning why they are making the assumption that other researchers need to be questioned,” Carney said, and later added: “It is not clear to us why these other scientists were being targeted.”
National Journal also includes this:
The American Association of University Professors does not have an official position on the letters, but the group referred questions to Martin Kich, an English professor at Wright State University.
Kich said Grijalva has every right to ask for the sources and amounts of research grants and specific proposals that have been funded. “But in requesting the personal correspondence of faculty, he is asking the institutions to violate the academic freedom of those faculty members. AAUP will almost certainly be opposed to that,” he said in an email.
Michael Halpern serves as program manager of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy. He wrote that “parts of the requests are appropriate, and parts are not.” He stipulated that the universities and researchers should comply with requests for information about “funding and the agreements that come with it.” But he added:
Each letter also asks for draft testimony, presumably to see if funders influenced it. Just as I have supported universities’ efforts to protect communications among academics that constitute the research process, so, too, I see justification in protecting drafts of congressional testimony. Universities would be justified in resisting this aspect of the request.
Meanwhile, however, the street fight has escalated again, via retaliation from the right. Politico’s energy reporter Alex Guillén pointed out at the end of his report on the overall controversy that “some climate-skeptic groups [have now chosen] to mimic Grijalva’s probe by filing a similar request for information about University of Delaware climate scientist John Byrne.” Let Guillén’s final paragraph end this media report too:
“The sole distinctions are, first, that we far more narrowly tailor our request in comparison to Rep. Grijalva’s; second, our request is made pursuant to statutory authority,” wrote the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute and the Caesar Rodney Institute.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.