These are the people claiming authority to run — or ruin — our lives

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And here’s that same old lady, Jan Schakowsky, Il. and a colleague bringing their keen insight to global warming

Editor's note: On July 19, [2006] a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee held a hearing on "Questions Surrounding the 'Hockey Stick' Temperature Studies: Implications for Climate Change Assessments." Those studies, under the lead authorship of paleoclimatologist Michael Mann, claimed that that the 1990s were likely the warmest decade and 1998 likely the warmest year in a millennium. They reached iconic status in the climate change debate when they were cited in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as proof of unprecedented human induced global warming.

The hearing on July 19th was to hear a report to the subcommittee by a panel headed by Edward Wegman, who chairs the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, that found Mann and his co-authors had misused certain statistical techniques in their studies, techniques that tended to produce hockey stick shapes in the temperature history. Further they found the studies were peer reviewed by a "social network" within the paleoclimate community who wrote papers together, reviewed each others work and shared the same data sets. Here are some excerpts from that hearing that -- for the most part -- speak for themselves

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On basing policy on science or science on policy

Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill.: "I'm very concerned that this is being used in a way to discredit the whole notion that our country and the rest of the industrialized and developing world ought to do anything about global warming. And that's why I ask you that question, Dr. Wegman, if this does not make you somewhat uncomfortable. Can you see in any way how this is being used and does it bother you?"

Edward Wegman: "I can understand that it's your job to sort out the political ramifications of what I have said. In some sense it's not fair for you to say well, gee, you reported on some fact and that's going to be used in a bad way."

On the same issue, from a witness in a second panel

Dr. Hans von Storch, director of the Institute for Coastal Research, GKSS-Research Centre Geesthacht GmbH, Geesthacht, Germany and professor at the Meteorological Institute, University of Hamburg: "I was a bit disappointed about the comment from the lady from Illinois who said, aren't you afraid if you say this, that this would have negative implications on the policy process. I was kind of shocked. Should we really adopt what we say if that's useful for the policy process? Is that what you expect from science? If we give advice, must we first think, is it useful for something? I think that is not the way we should operate."

On how to describe an 88 degree F July day in Washington, D.C.  

Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-WI: "It doesn't take much more than a quick walk outside today to know that the thermometer has reached dangerously high levels and government heat alerts are abounding these days."