WP: GOP Chairmen Face Off on Global Warming [View All]

[DeepModem Mom]

GOP Chairmen Face Off on Global Warming
Public Tiff Over Probe of Study Highlights Divide on Issue

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 18, 2005; Page A04


House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.) has demanded that another senior Republican, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (Tex.), call off his investigation of three scientists who have charted Earth's rapid warming in recent decades.

The unusual public tiff between two powerful GOP lawmakers highlights the sharp divide that drives the nation's climate change debate. Barton, along with President Bush and many other House Republicans, opposes mandatory curbs on greenhouse gas emissions and questions the science underlying such efforts. Boehlert, who backs limits on carbon dioxide pollution, said he fears such attacks could chill future scientific inquiry.

In a sharply worded letter sent last week, Boehlert called Barton's probe into the findings of Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes a "misguided and illegitimate investigation." Mann will direct the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University as of next month, Bradley is a geosciences professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Hughes is a professor at the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

Using climate records culled from tree rings, glacial-ice layers and coral-growth layers, the three professors -- whose research was funded in part by the federal government -- determined in 1998 that temperatures have skyrocketed in the past century compared with the 500 years preceding it. The three men put the figures in a graph now known as the "hockey stick," and their work helped prompt the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001 to declare the 1990s as the warmest decade in the past 1,000 years....

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In a letter Boehlert publicly released yesterday, the veteran GOP moderate asserted that his panel has jurisdiction over climate change and that Barton is targeting these scientists because he disagrees with their conclusions....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/17/AR2005071701056.html