Environmental ▼ News Congressman asks to see raw data
© 2005 American Chemical Society
group of self-styled skeptics continue to pick away at the science. Barton’s requests come as a growing number of scientists charge that President Bush has been attempting to make the science on global warming appear uncertain. Rick Piltz, a government employee in the U.S. Climate U.S. CONGRESS
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n what observers are calling an unprecedented request, a member of the U.S. Congress has asked prominent researchers for all the raw data underpinning an influential historical study that shows that the earth’s climate has been warming dramatically since 1900. In a letter dated June 23 and sent to three scientists, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) charges that other researchers have found methodological flaws and data errors in their study, which has become known as the hockey-stick paper. Barton also asserts that the researchers have failed to share their raw data and the computer code used in the analysis. However, scientists familiar with the research say that the hockey-stick paper has already stood up to intense scientific scrutiny and that the raw data are already available. They say that the request is simply politics and is meant to intimidate climate scientists from further linking global warming to human activity. The hockey-stick paper (Nature 1998, 329, 779–787) became a fundamental part of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) third assessment report, Climate Change 2001. The article and report synthesize 12 data sets—such as the width of tree rings and the isotopic composition of ice cores—to generate a chart of temperature variation in the Northern Hemisphere. Temperatures remain flat before 1900 but then increase, so that the resulting graph looks like a hockey stick. Although many scientists point to this analysis and numerous other studies to argue that global warming is real and is caused by human activity, a small
Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX)
Change Science Program, recently resigned because White House officials were making excessive changes to the program’s reports. In letters to Michael Mann, an assistant professor with the department of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, and two of his colleagues, Barton wrote: “Provide the location of all data archives relating to each published study for which you were an author or coauthor.” Barton also asked for curricula vitae, lists of all sources of financial support for research, and the computer code used to generate the hockey-stick analysis. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) also received a letter from Barton requesting a list of “all grants and all other funding given for research in the area of climate.” The letter also asks for details of any violations concern-
ing the sharing of information and enjoins NSF to describe “in detail how your agency has supported or disseminated the information in the Mann et al. studies.” According to a staff spokesperson in Barton’s office, who requested anonymity, “the letter is part of an overarching goal of data quality.” When asked whether Barton’s letters might have a chilling effect on scientists, she said, “I don’t know.” “The thrust and tone of the letters indicate that [Barton] has been advised by someone who does not understand the science,” says John Holdren, a professor of environmental science and public policy at Harvard University and president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “What a pain,” says Frank von Hippel, a professor of public and international affairs at Princeton University and a former assistant director in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “It looks like the work of these anti-climate-change fundamentalists,” he added. “These guys are really feeling their oats.” Barton chairs the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Energy and Commerce but does not sit on the Committee on Science. When asked whether the energy committee had any scientists on staff, Barton’s spokesperson again responded, “I don’t know.” She added that Barton has a degree in engineering. In his letter, Barton references a February news story in The Wall Street Journal that focused on work by Stephen McIntyre, a former director of several small public mineral exploration companies, who charges that Mann’s Nature article
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Environmental▼ News contains methodological flaws and data errors. According to Barton’s spokesperson, the key arguments in his letter are found in a paper published by McIntyre and McKitrick this year in Energy & Environment —an obscure journal found in only 25 institutions worldwide, according to Journal Citation Reports. Energy & Environment is not included in the Journal Citation Reports list of impact factors for the top 6000 peer-reviewed journals. McIntyre and University of Guelph (Canada) environmental economist Ross McKitrick have also published their critique in Geophysical Research Letters, a peer-reviewed journal (Geophys. Res. Lett. 2005, 32, L03710, doi 10.1029/2004GL021750). McKitrick is also a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, a conservative Canadian think tank that received $60,000 from oil giant ExxonMobil in 2003. In Energy & Environment, McIntyre and McKitrick write that peer review by paleoclimate journals does not compare “with the level of due diligence involved in auditing financial statements or carrying out a feasibility study in mineral development.” They then say that IPCC should not have used Mann’s hockey-stick model without verifying it. In the article, they also claim that Mann will not release the computer source code used in the hockey-stick paper despite “unsuccessful appeals to Nature and the U.S. National Science Foundation.” “It is my intent to comply with the committee’s request,” wrote Mann in an email to ES&T. “They have asked for a substantial amount of material, and it will take some time to compile this.” He adds, “I am confident that when members of Congress take a look at the science, they will join with the consensus of the world’s scientists that the earth is indeed warming and that human activity has played a primary role in the warming observed in recent decades.”
David Stonner, the congressional liaison at NSF, says that the agency is meeting with Barton’s staff to try to figure out exactly what they want. “They have basically asked us to send them everything we’ve ever done on climate change in the last 10 years,” he says. Stonner adds that NSF policy is that all research results should be shared. Still, he finds Barton’s letter unique. “We sometimes get complaints [from Congress], maybe on awards, but to the best of my knowledge it’s never concerned data.” Mann says that his data are freely available on the web. In May of this year, Caspar Amman, a paleoclimatologist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, reanalyzed Mann’s data on his own computer and found that Mann’s finding “is robust even when numerous modifications are employed.” Amman has two papers undergoing peer review, at the journals Climatic Change and Geophysical Research Letters. “I feel there is an attempt to intrude on the work of scientists,” says Michael Bender, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University and a member of the board on atmospheric sciences and climate at the U.S. National Academies. “The other issue is government attempting to intimidate scientists that have findings they don’t agree with.”
Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says he does not feel that scientists, will feel intimidated by Barton because Mann’s paper is becoming less crucial as more studies agree with the original findings. “This isn’t a serious attempt to understand the science,” he says. “It’s just politics.” Holdren says that half a dozen different studies that used separate data sets, such as those from boreholes and glaciers, have confirmed the findings of Mann’s original study. “I think that once you get into the gory details, the result is going to show that Mann is right.” Holdren adds that although research in obscure journals has little effect on scientists, it does lead to editorials and news coverage in The Wall Street Journal, which changes how other media cover global warming. “The New York Times and The Washington Post are so afraid of being accused of bias,” Holdren says. In June of this year, the presidents of 11 national academies of science signed a statement that climate change is real. “Action taken now to reduce significantly the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will lessen the magnitude and rate of climate change,” wrote the presidents. Signatories included scientific leaders from the U.S., U.K., China, India, and Russia. —PAUL D. THACKER
Predicting beach bacterial counts A new method for estimating E. coli concentrations could help ensure that beach advisories or closures are based on more near-real-time data than they are now. Current monitoring procedures cause a 24-hour delay between sample collection and test results, so predictions of today’s conditions are based on yesterday’s E. coli ratings, says Richard Whitman, station chief for the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Lake Michigan Ecological Research Station. To address this problem, USGS scientists developed a mathematical model, dubbed Project SAFE (Swim Advisory Forecast Estimate). Weather and water-quality measurements—such as rainfall, wave height, and lake turbidity— are plugged in daily, and preliminary results indicate that SAFE is as much as six times more accurate than other monitoring techniques at estimating current E. coli counts, according to Whitman. USGS is validating the method this summer through a pilot project on five Lake Michigan beaches in Indiana and has proposed expanding it to other Great Lakes beaches.
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USGS
Exposing tadpoles to low levels of pesticides in the presence of natural predators impairs their growth and development, leaving them at a competitive disadvantage, according to new research published in this issue of ES&T (pp 6079–6085). The study reinforces a growing body of research that suggests that commonly used acute toxicity tests seriously underestimate pesticides’ ecological impact, because they don’t account for synergistic effects.
Rana temporaria tadpoles coping with predators and pesticides may experience fatal developmental delays.
Pesticides in combination with cues that predators are nearby were recently shown to lead to higher death rates in developing tadpoles (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2004, 38, 83A–84A). Although the reasons for the worldwide decline in amphibians are still unclear, one evolving theory from this new study and others is that amphibians are under attack from a “double dose of danger”—the combined effects of multiple stressors. The ES&T study’s researchers were with the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University (Sweden) and the Ecological Genetics Research Unit at the University of Helsinki (Finland). They found that European common frog (Rana temporaria) tadpoles exposed to low concentrations—2 micrograms per liter (µg/L)—of the common fungicide fenpropimorph and living with the visual
and chemical signals of caged dragonfly larvae—a natural predator—were smaller and developed more slowly than their siblings raised with a single stressor. The tadpoles had been grown in the laboratory from eggs collected from an uncontaminated forest pond and exposed for nearly two months in laboratory tanks to fenpropimorph with or without caged predators at concentrations that were 1000 times lower than the fungicide’s 50% lethal concentration (LC50 ) value for fish. A developmental delay is fatal to frogs living in temporary ponds that dry up in summer and can also lead to decreased survival and lower fecundity later in life, say the paper’s authors. “In nature, tadpoles are exposed to a very complex mixture of biotic and abiotic stress factors,” explains Henna Piha, a Ph.D. student at the University of Helsinki and the article’s corresponding author. “Fenpropimorph may therefore affect frog populations in the wild, because it is like adding just one stress factor more,” she adds. What the authors of the paper “have seen was not outright [increased] mortality, but that pesticides, at concentrations found in nature, alter the fitness of amphibian populations,” says Christine Bridges, an ecotoxicologist at the Columbia Environmental Research Center of the U.S. Geological Survey. Bridges points out that many more synergistic effects exist in nature. “It is really important to look at more than one factor,” she warns. The paper also reports that at the highest concentration of fenpropimorph investigated, 11 µg/ L, chronic exposure killed most of the tadpoles, whether or not predators were present; only 7% reached metamorphosis. The effects of fenpropimorph can change dramatically within a relatively small concentration range, say the authors. —ORI SCHIPPER
News Briefs NAS perchlorate recommendation questioned
State toxicologists from Connecticut and Maine have published a critique in Environmental Health Perspectives (doi 10.1289/ehp.8254) of the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) perchlorate reference dose. The NAS committee recommended a reference dose about 20 times higher than that in the U.S. EPA’s draft (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2005, 38, 96A– 97A), which was intended to resolve disagreement over the safe level of perchlorate in drinking water. In the new paper, Gary Ginsburg and Deborah Rice maintain that the reference dose for perchlorate derived by NAS and listed in EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) is too high to protect public health with a reasonable margin of safety.
Advances in green chemistry
What happens to a new technology, compared with partial hydrogenation, that has the potential to eliminate the need for 400 million pounds (lb) of soybean oil, 20 million lb of sodium methoxide, 116 million lb of soap, 50 million lb of bleaching clay, and 60 million gallons of water every year? In June, that technology earned Archer Daniels Midland Co. (ADM) one of its two 2005 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards. This year, three companies shared the Alternative Synthetic Pathways Award. ADM and Novozymes North America, Inc., were recognized for developing a green way to make fats and oils healthier. The pharmaceutical company Merck earned its share of the award for redesigning the synthesis of a drug that abates chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting. ADM also received an award for reducing volatile organic compounds in latex paints. Other winning technologies included copolymers produced by microbial fermentation.
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PHOTODISC
Pesticides, natural stressors trip up tadpoles
