[Mb-civic] A Bid to Chill Thinking - David Ignatius - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

<>A Bid to Chill Thinking
Behind Joe Barton's Assault on Climate Scientists

By David Ignatius
Friday, July 22, 2005; Page A23

In today's partisan political climate, science has inevitably become a 
political football. But I can't remember anything quite as nasty -- or 
as politically skewed -- as Rep. Joe Barton's recent attack on 
scientists whose views on global warming he doesn't like.

Barton, an 11-term Republican from Texas, is chairman of the House 
Energy and Commerce Committee and one of the oil lobby's best friends on 
Capitol Hill. Late last month he fired off letters to professor Michael 
Mann of the University of Virginia and two other scientists demanding 
information about what he claimed were "methodological flaws and data 
errors" in their studies of global warming.

<>Barton's letters to the scientists had a peremptory, 
when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife tone. Mann was told that within less 
than three weeks, he must list "all financial support you have received 
related to your research," provide "the location of all data archives 
relating to each published study for which you were an author," "provide 
all agreements relating to . . . underlying grants or funding," and 
deliver similarly detailed information in five other categories.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/21/AR2005072102186.html?nav=hcmodule 

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