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Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Dr. Kerry Emanuel speaks to congressional committee as a private citizen

From Dr. Emanuel's written testimony:


Now I want to speak to you not only as a scientist but as a citizen. I am appalled at the energetic campaign of disinformation being waged in the climate arena. I have watched good, decent, hardworking scientists savaged and whole fields of scholarship attacked without merit. Consider as an example the issues surrounding the email messages stolen from some climate scientists. I know something about this as I served on a panel appointed by the Royal Society of Great Britain, under the direction of Lord Oxburgh, to investigate allegations of scientific misconduct by the scientists working at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Neither we nor several other investigative panels found any evidence of misconduct. To be sure, we confirmed what was by then well known, that a handful of scientists had exercised poor judgment in constructing a figure for a non peer-reviewed
publication. Rather than omitting the entire record of a particularly dubious tree-ring-based proxy, the authors of the figure only omitted that part of it that was provably false. If this was a conspiracy to deceive, though, it was exceedingly poorly conceived as anyone with the slightest interest in the subject could (and did) immediately find the whole proxy record in the peer-reviewed literature.

The true scandal here is the enormously successful attempt to elevate this single lapse of judgment on the part of a small number of scientists into a sweeping condemnation of a whole scholarly endeavor. When the history of this event is written, the efforts of those seeking to discredit climate science will be seen for what they are; why many cannot see it now is a mystery to me.

http://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/hearings/Emanuel%20testimony.pdf

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