Published on Wednesday, July 27, 2005 by the Boston GlobeDerrick Jackson
House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton is so obstinate about global warming that he is harassing top scientists. Those scientists, who include Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts, helped the United Nations global panel on climate change and the National Science Foundation conclude that the world has heated up dramatically in the last few decades compared with the several hundred years before.
Study after study has replicated the findings that human activity is the cause. Americans, with our exponentially disproportionate consumption of fossil fuels and our resulting belch of pollution, bear prime responsibility for it. Yet Barton, the House member most beholden to energy interests, keeps telling us to wait a few hundred more years and it will get cold again. He wants to probe the financial records, study methods, sources, proof of objectivity, and proof of ethical independence of climate change researchers. He asked them: ''In the area of climate or paleoclimate research, are you aware of any violation of requirements or obligations concerning the sharing and dissemination of data and research, pursuant to applicable agency and federal policies? If so describe each violation."
It is funny for Barton to use the 25-cent word ''paleoclimate," since his Paleolithic position renders him illiterate for anything the scientists could give him. Thankfully, at least one major Republican wants more modern thinking. Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York is chairman of the House Science Committee and someone who reads enough material from the National Academy of Sciences to call for a rise in automotive fuel efficiency to 33 miles per gallon.
Boehlert sent Barton a letter asking him to call off a ''misguided and illegitimate investigation." Boehlert said, ''My primary concern about your investigation is that its purpose seems to be to intimidate scientists rather than to learn from them and to substitute congressional political review for scientific review."
Barton quickly dismissed the letter as one of many ''heated lectures" he gets over global warming. He is too busy enjoying his personal gusher. Since 1989, Barton ranks third among active politicians in contributions from the energy lobby, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. His $1.9 million trails only fellow Texans President Bush ($7.7 million) and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison ($2 million).
In March of 2001, when President Bush kicked off his presidency by pulling out of the Kyoto treaty for global warming and reneging on promises to cut back carbon dioxide emissions, Barton proclaimed at a committee hearing: ''This is absolutely not the time, however, to label carbon dioxide as something which it is not, which is a pollutant, nor is it the time to regulate beyond what is scientifically proven and necessary. . . . I want to applaud the Bush administration for the common sense decision that they made yesterday to not regulate CO{-2} as a pollutant. . . . Any so-called-for pollutant bill would have not even been dead on arrival before this subcommittee, it would not have arrived at this subcommittee."
Despite the right wing's fervent claim that the Iraq invasion was not for oil, Barton last year said: ''Iraq is the one country that has significant potential to increase production. There were a lot of reasons to free Iraq and make it stable, but that's a big one for the United States."
Bush said he is still waiting for the ''sound science" to tell him what to do about global warming. After four years of isolating the United States from the world on the issue, he conceded at the recent Group of Eight summit that human activity is a factor. He still refuses to enter into any specific agreements to reduce greenhouse gases.
Last week, the new head of the National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone, gave testimony at a Senate hearing that makes Barton look like a fool. Cicerone, the former chancellor of the University of California-Irvine, said nearly every climate scientist believes in human-caused, fuel-burning global warming, with carbon dioxide is at its highest levels in 400,000 years.
Like Boehlert, several Republican senators -- John McCain of Arizona, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, and Pete Domenici of New Mexico -- acknowledge that climate change needs solutions. Their efforts are not yet so numerous or so bold as to assure a rise in fuel standards or stop the drive to drill in the Arctic. But when one Republican House chair tells another Republican House chair that his probe of climate change researchers is an illegitimate attempt to intimidate scientists, there is a glimmer of hope that sound science might actually see the light of day on Capitol Hill.
