Opponents of Climate Regulations Start Targeting Scientists

One of Congress’s staunchest opponents of climate action launched another attack on climate science this week, this time going directly after the scientists themselves.

It’s an old political tactic with a dark history that is surfacing again as state legislators and federal lawmakers weigh regulations that are opposed by some of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the country.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) on Tuesday used his position as the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to issue a “minority report” that pulls a handful of comments out of thousands of pages of private emails among scientists that were hacked into last year just before the international climate change conference in Copenhagen.

The report goes farther than Inhofe's usual arguments, though. In it, his staff writes:

“In our view, the CRU documents and emails reveal, among other things, unethical and potentially illegal behavior by some of the world’s preeminent climate scientists.”

Inhofe names 17 top climate scientists, but he doesn’t back up his allegation of “potentially illegal behavior” under any U.S. law. In fact, the person whose emails he overwhelmingly quotes is a British scientist, Phil Jones, who in December stepped aside as director of CRU, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK, during a internal investigation of the emails. For most of the U.S. scientists the report targets, Inhofe offers no basis for his allegations other than to say they were recipients of the emails.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the committee, noted the shift in tone of Inhofe’s attack.

“We are now seeing colleagues attack America's most respected institutions,” Boxer said at the close of the hearing. “We are now seeing the other side attack our own people in America who are not political, who care about his country, who love this country, who have dedicated themselves to make sure we have the facts.”

Rick Piltz, a former senior official with the U.S. Climate Change Science Program who exposed censorship of climate science during the Bush administration, described the Inhofe report as a "classic Joe McCarthyite witch-hunt: page after page of incorrect and misleading statements, a list of federal laws that allegedly may make scientists subject to prosecution by the U.S. Justice Department, and a list of names and affiliations of 17 ‘key players’ in the ‘CRU Controversy’ over stolen e-mails and their connections with IPCC reports.”

Expert Testimony and Political Pressure

Scientists have been trying for years to explain climate change to lawmakers in states and the federal government. The measurements from multiple sources make clear that temperatures have been warming since the industrial revolution, and the vast majority of scientists agree that human actions, particularly the greenhouse gases pumped out by the burning of fossil fuels, contribute to the problem.

Science is complex, though. As even basic high school science teaches, our understanding of the planet is continually evolving and rarely is our understanding 100 percent certain. Scientific inquiry is, at its heart, about questioning and learning.

That process — and the scientists themselves — are now coming under attack by politicians.

In Utah, scientists from the state’s three largest universities may have put their own careers at risk when they tried to explain to lawmakers there the science of climate change.