This letter is available here as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.

February 8, 2007

The Honorable Bernard Sanders
The Honorable Dianne Feinstein
The Honorable Patrick Leahy
The Honorable John Kerry
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senators Sanders, Feinstein, Leahy, and Kerry:

I am writing in response to your letter to me of February 6 (Attachment 1).

Your letter says that you would be saddened if last week’s news reports about AEI were accurate, but the accusatory tone and harsh wording of your letter make it clear that you believe the reports are accurate. (Moreover Senator Sanders posted your letter on his official website with a press release stating that “[i]t's outrageous that a right-wing think tank with ties to Big Oil and the Bush Administration is trying to twist scientific findings for their political purposes on the pressing issue of climate change.”) So let me begin by saying that I am saddened that you would not only believe the reports but would seek to give them credence by repeating them in ways that are even more reckless than the original article published last Friday by the Guardian (Attachment 2).

The accusations of the Guardian article, and of your letter, are false. I sent around a memorandum to my AEI colleagues the day the article was published, attaching the letters we had sent to various scientists and policy experts knowledgeable about climate change issues (one of the letters was quoted in part by the Guardian). My memo and the letters are attached here (Attachment 3). Relevant portions of these documents were in circulation on the Internet last weekend and in the press earlier this week; they were readily available to anyone on your staffs who had wished to look into the matter or to call me or anyone else at AEI about it.

I am also attaching (Attachment 4) a list of all of AEI’s publications and conferences on climate change issues over the past decade, with URLs for their postings on the AEI website. I recommend this work to you highly; I believe it has contributed substantially to public consideration of climate change issues and exemplifies the kind of “honest discussion” that you suggest AEI is permitting to be trumped by “donors’ self-interest.”

Because of your letter’s focus on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change process, I should point out that AEI’s publications and conferences have included a wide range of expert opinion on the issues addressed by the IPCC, and that most of our work has been devoted to evaluating policy options to respond to global warming--that is, on the assumption that the IPCC projections turn out to be correct. Moreover, we have regularly invited senior IPCC scientists to participate in our research and conferences (usually without success, but for reasons of scheduling conflicts and time commitments we knew to be genuine). AEI, like other research institutes, routinely pays fees for research, writing, and conference presentations commensurate to the amount of effort involved. We have indeed offered fees of as much as $10,000 to scientists and policy experts for substantial, original research in connection with the project detailed in the attached letters, and have done so--rather obviously!--without regard to their “positions” on various IPCC issues. Instead, our regard has been for the quality and pertinence of their work and the opportunity costs of their time, which we have found is often considerable. AEI has never paid anyone to conduct research with a predetermined result and has never accepted a donation premised on such research.

The accusations of your letter, while couched in the form of questions and insinuations, are as I said harshly worded, and are extremely serious coming from four members of the United States Senate. And they are leveled at a long-established research institution, familiar to all of you, which takes the integrity and independence of its research equally seriously (our public statement of policies and procedures on these matters is my final attachment--Attachment 5). So it is not a rhetorical question to ask whether you stand by your letter and think it was well-considered.

Finally, I must take exception to your pointed opening reference to “the depths to which some would sink to undermine the scientific consensus that human activity is the major source of global climate change.” I believe you have overstated the scientific consensus on the subject, but, even if you have not, I find it worrisome that four powerful political leaders would object to scientific dissent per se. Although you later give a formulaic nod to the right of dissent, you object to being paid a “significant” sum for dissenting research, which rather limits your conception of permissible dissent.

Consensus--and freedom to challenge consensus--are equally vital to the progress of science. History, including recent history, is replete with examples of expert consensus that turned out in the fullness of time to be mistaken. When I look over AEI’s publications and conferences on climate change issues, I can indeed find arguments against (as well as for) aspects of IPCC modeling and other matters where some have urged that public debate should cease. I want you to know that AEI will continue to sponsor research and host speakers on climate change issues whose views we regard as reasonable and worthy of attention--never seeking to undermine any consensus for its own sake, but also never paying heed to whether particular views are in or out of official favor. AEI scholars have stood in opposition to established orthodoxy many times; we cherish our intellectual freedom and are proud of the uses we have made of that freedom; we will not be silenced by threats to that freedom.

Yours truly,
Christopher DeMuth
President