Congressman Seeks Scientists' Personal Data

jfengel writes "The Washington Post reports that House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) has requested raw data and personal financial information on three scientists who published a paper which claimed that temperatures rose precipitously in the 20th century. Colleagues (including other Republicans) are calling the investigation 'misguided and illegitimate.' Barton has long been an opponent of government action on global warming."

Comments

And in the other corner ...

[jamesl]

For a different perspective on the same news:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=274#more-274/
The head of the Energy Committee is asking for the source code for the statistical calculations that "prove" we're experiencing global warming. Code that was developed with US Government money.

No more than an open source advocate would expect.

The source has now been released.

Re:Not black and white.

[recoiledsnake]

You don't need *personal* financial information to find who funded the study.

Rep. Joe Barton financial stats

[Animats]

The top industries supporting Joe Barton are:

1. Oil & Gas $224,398
2. Electric Utilities $221,951

Top contributors

1. Anadarko Petroleum $55,000
2. SBC Communications $20,550
3. Comcast Corp $19,000
4. Dominion Resources $16,000
5. Reliant Energy $15,000
6. Valero Energy $15,000
7. TXU Corp $14,250
8. Lyondell Chemical $13,250
9. Texas Industries $13,000
10. El Paso Corp $11,998

Any questions?

They gave it to him...

[TapeCutter]

The scientists responses. They gave him all he wanted and then some. I don't think he was expecting the answer he got and probably wishes he hadn't asked it now.

Read all about it

[uncadonna]

here

Some main points that don't seem to have come out so far in the Slashdot discussion so far are that

• the congressman is parroting criticisms from a certain Canadian gadfly who has been proven on several occasions not to be well educated on matters of physical climatology.
• these criticisms have been picked up by the Wall Street Journal (in an editorial piece that was severely flawed in other ways as well), but carry no weight in the scientific community, and any serious investigation would show this to be the case.
• The letter was accusatory in tone and onerous in its demands. It wasn;t the request for clarification that is at stake, it is the punishment for results that are out of line with what the congressman wants
• The individual result is illustrative of the seriousness of the situation, so it has received a lot of attention, including from the IPCC. Opponents of the scientific consensus, being political rather than scientific, decided this was an opportunity. They are attempting to tar the entire field with the brush of this purportedly bad article
• It's not clear why the authors took so ling to release the code. However, if this means that conservative elements in congress are going to support a mandate for a purely open source tool chain in non-military science, that will certainly be a silver lining!

Anyway, follow the link and read what the main scientific institutions think of this episode before you come to your own conclusions please.

Also, if you don't mind signing in, see the recent editorial in the New York Times. It includes the following:

Sherwood Boehlert of New York - a fellow Republican who is chairman of the House Science Committee and an enlightened moderate on environmental issues - seemed much closer to the truth when he described Mr. Barton's inquisition as "an effort to intimidate scientists rather than learn from them, and to substitute Congressional political review for scientific peer review."

No personal financial information was requested

[Skippy_kangaroo]

You simply can not believe everything you read in a paper. The article summary is simply wrong. No personal financial information was requested. You can verify this for yourself if you go and read the actual letters at this link.

You will see that what was requested was:

2. List all financial support you have received related to your research, including, but not limited to, all private, state, and federal assistance, grants, contracts (including subgrants or subcontracts), or other financial awards or honoraria.
3. Regarding all such work involving federal grants or funding support under which you were a recipient of funding or principal investigator, provide all agreements relating to those underlying grants or funding, including, but not limited to, any provisions, adjustments, or exceptions made in the agreements relating to the dissemination and sharing of research results.

That is not personal financial information - that is information that bears directly on his disclosure responsibilities. NSF grants require disclosure of the resultant products (data and algorithms). Asking about funding serves to establish what disclosure obligations result.

Re:Not black and white.

[Viadd]

Maybe the congressman should disclose in who's pocket he is.

http://opensecrets.org/races/indus.asp?ID=TX06&cyc le=2004&special=N

Top Industries
2004 RACE: TEXAS DISTRICT 6
Joe Barton (R)*
Oil & Gas $224,398
Electric Utilities $221,951
Health Professionals $205,650
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products $151,276
TV/Movies/Music $93,500

Re:The only real test

[MillionthMonkey]

Theory = not reproduced enough to be called a Law or Fact.

In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"--part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is "only" a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science--that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."

Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory--natural selection--to explain the mechanism of evolution.

-Stephen Jay Gould

Re:Not black and white.

[shark72]

"Maybe the congressman should disclose in who's pocket he is."

He's a Republican from Texas, and is the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. For Timo and our other friends in the UK: put together "Texas" and "Energy" and you have "oil." He worked in the oil industry before he was elected to congress. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the oil industry is his top contributor -- they gave him nearly a quarter million bucks in 2004.

In an interview on NPR, he stated that he wanted to collect the raw data so that he could pass it along to his own "experts" -- that is, scientists in the employ of oil companies. In other words, he wants to use the scientists' own data against them.