Steller: Grijalva's letters send chilling message to scientists

Grijalva, the congressman representing Tucson’s south and west sides and much of Southern Arizona, sent out letters Feb. 24 demanding information about the funding, testimony and communications of seven researchers who’ve written about climate change. All of them had produced research uncomfortable for the Democratic Party orthodoxy on global warming.

But Pielke isn’t just a University of Colorado researcher who documented that global warming is not the cause of the increasing cost of natural disasters in the world. (The real cause is increasing population and wealth, he’s found.) He’s also written extensively about the relationship between scientists and politicians.

His 2007 book, “The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics,” is “a field guide for scientists operating in politically contentious issues,” Pielke told me Thursday.

Grijalva, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, sent letters to seven university presidents, asking for information about one faculty member at each school. One of them was Arizona State University climatologist Robert Balling Jr., who told me Thursday he hasn’t done global-warming research since 2008.

“Early on I was identified with the skeptic camp, and I’ve been unable to shake that,” he said. “I’ll take it to my grave.”

In Pielke’s case, the relevant research was his work on natural disasters, which undercut the notion that global warming was causing the increasing damage resulting from weather-related calamities.

In a statement written for his most recent book, “The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change,” Pielke wrote: “Science tells us that humans are influencing the climate system and that there are very real risks. But if advocates for action go beyond what science can support, then they risk their credibility on the climate issue more generally.”

Grijalva’s motivation was the recent revelation by Greenpeace, published in the New York Times and elsewhere, that a famous global-warming skeptic, Willie Soon, had received $1.2 million from the fossil-fuel industry without disclosing it. Soon works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and published 11 papers that did not reveal the industry sources of their funding, the Times reported.

Still, several scientific groups expressed outrage this week that Grijalva targeted scientists based on the results of their research. He asked each university president for the school’s policies on financial disclosure, testimony by the relevant scientist and all aspects of the researchers’ funding and salary. In particular, scientists found the letters’ requests for communications by the scientists about their funding and testimony to be troubling.

Grijalva later conceded that the request for communications was “overreach” on his part.

On Wednesday, the journal Nature published an editorial that concluded, “When politicians seek to probe beyond possible sources of external influence on published work and attempt to expose internal discussions that they find inconvenient, that sends a chilling message to all academics and to the wider public.”

Pielke put it to me this way: “If you do everything right, if you publish widely, if you take that research before government and share it and it has impact, that’s success.”

But if the result is retribution, he said, “then you’ll have a lot less people willing to participate in the political process.”

REP. MARTHA MCSALLY (L)

We residents of Congressional District 2 were fully aware we’d elected a Republican when Martha McSally won November’s election.

I, for one, wasn’t aware we’d also elected a Likudnik.

It was dismaying for me to see McSally react with complete credulousness to the speech this week in the House of Representatives by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a member of that country’s Likud Party. Here’s how she began her star-struck statement on Netanyahu’s visit:

“I was honored to be present for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech, shake his hand, and hear his unfiltered perspective at such a critical time. He is exactly right when he says one of the greatest dangers facing our world is the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons, and the deal being worked on by the Administration would quicken that marriage.”

You don’t have to believe in Iran’s honesty, or even to think our negotiation with Iran is yielding optimal results, to see problems with her statement.

First, I expect someone of McSally’s intelligence to keep a critical eye open at all times, but especially in dealing with matters of war and peace. There were the politics of Netanyahu’s speech — allowing him to speak to Congress was a breach of protocol and a Republican tweak of Obama. It also was an attempt to boost the prime minister’s electoral hopes.

Finally, his arguments echo what he and others said more than a decade ago, arguing in favor of the U.S. going to war against Iraq. And it all seems to have gone over McSally’s head.

I considered Netanyahu’s speech an anti-American event, not because it criticized the president’s approach, but because it undermined the foreign policy of the administration we elected, and it placed another country’s interests above our own. Israel and America may be good friends, but our interests don’t always align.

McSally’s naive regurgitation of the Republican/Likud party line on Iran was disappointingly partisan.

SIGN IN FOR OPEN MEETING

I attended my first meeting of the Citizens Water Advisory Committee at Tucson Water Wednesday morning. It is considered a public meeting, requiring 24 hours notice and open access, but I don’t think it really was public.

The meetings start at 7 a.m., before the Tucson Water building opens. That means you need to enter the building via one of two elevators in the basement parking lot. I pressed the 3 button to go to the third floor meeting room, but actually you can only go to the first floor.

There, you sign in with a security guard, provide a telephone number, get a security badge, and return to the elevator. The security officer turns a key in the elevator, allowing you to go to the third floor.

There, you find a locked door and a reception window. The worker at the window buzzes you through the locked door and sends you down the hall to the meeting room, which on Wednesday was too small for the crowd that attended.

Requiring signing in at a public meeting violates Arizona’s public meetings law, as does providing a room that is too small. The bottom line: If security must be that tight at Tucson Water, then the meeting should be held elsewhere.