With respect to the early part of the question, one of the guiding principles of the implementation of the U.S. Global Change program is that program shall be peer-reviewed. The elements that are in the program have gone through a panel process before they are even introduced into the program; and that the agencies such as NSF and NASA and NOAA who are the primary agencies connecting to the scientific community are all done in an open peerreview process.

There are many more proposals than we can possibly fund. So there is going to be some unhappiness that we cannot fund everyone, but having watched the mail-review process and the panel-review process right up close, I can find no evidence to support any allegation that there has been brought to bear influence form the political side of the equation.

It never even gets to the panel, and it never even gets to may level.

Thank you.

Ms. RIVERS. And, Mr. Chair, I just wanted to point out that when we were discussing a situation earlier, I was so busy wanting to let you know that I remembered my first year law classes and the definition of libel that I completely forgot to mention the whole issue of privilege, and the fact that anyone who testifies in front of a Congressional Committee is privileged and may not be the subject of a suit by an outside person.

So anybody who wants to come forward-and I would urge them to please do so with accusations about mistreatment by federal employees, please, if this is a problem, we have got to get it out in the open and we have got to take action.

Mr. CORELL. We would agree.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Whether I had ever been a lawyer at all, or ever has legal training, does that protection also cover someone who has testified and later is asked by the news media and then makes that statement to the news media?

Ms. RIVERS. It certainly would be something that the person could look into. The only thing they would find themselves subject to, of course, is perjury if they are not telling the truth.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. No, no. If someone testified before us and then made a statement-I know this is true of Members; Members can make a statement on the Floor and they can also make that same statement to members of the media and they are protected

Ms. RIVERS. It is privilege in terms of getting it to us, which of course is what the doctor wanted was for us to take action.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. But it is not privileged for someone to make a statement before us? I am not sure. That is why I am asking. And then go to the outside-when a reporter asks for clarification on this, my guess is from what we have been told is that her lawyers were afraid that any type of follow-through

Ms. RIVERS. Of course no one has to answer any questions of the press, and the whole question was whether or not someone could come forward with the specifics of these allegations and get some relief from Congress, and the law does indeed provide for that.

Thank you.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Well, I hope you will join me now in writing Mrs. O'Leary to make sure that she stands up to the Vice President's Office after she announced that Mr. Happer would be retained, and then she fired him instead. So perhaps we will get a joint letter together and ask that she stand by her original decision to keep him because he was qualified for the position.

Mr. Olver, why don't you go ahead and be next-oh, excuse me, I'm sorry. I didn't see you, Mr. Ehlers.

Mr. EHLERS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am getting used to being overlooked.

My apologies for being late, and coming back. I had two quick meetings on the Floor that detained me.

I will use the Bartlett approach and run through a series of questions for everyone, or not quite everyone but several, and ask them to comment on it.

I do have to say that I am in a bit of a dilemma on this issue, as so many that we deal with, in the sense that those of you who know me know that I am fairly cautious and careful and conservative.

I am torn on the one hand by saying, well, as a good fiscal conservative we should not spend money on things that we may not need.

But as an environmental conservative, or a conservationist, I say we have got to be very careful to make sure we do not get into an irreversible situation.

On that score I appreciate Dr. Nierenberg's testimony and I am going to ask him in a minute to amplify on that.

I should parenthetically note that our relationship goes back a long ways. I had him as a professor at Berkeley many years ago and ended up doing my thesis work under Dr. Nierenberg.

So, for better or for worse, I have been greatly influenced by him over the years. He is a very distinguished scientist who has not only served the cause of science well, but has also been very active in government service on many different panels beginning in the 1960s.

I think he is partly responsible for my political career because when he came back from Washington after various panels, he would talk to his graduate students about what went on in Washington.

I will never forget the time when he came back and said he had resigned from a very important panel dealing with the Vietnam War, saying no matter what we do it is going to get worse and we can't do anything about it, so I'm getting out, and particularly since the President wouldn't listen to his advice at that time.

So I do appreciate your coming here today and testifying. Another comment I wanted to make, Dr. Watson, on your testimony. A very key point and something that I learned long ago in life is that prevention is far, far cheaper and generally far better than anything else you can do. This is particularly true in the envi

ronment.

Preventing a toxic waste spill is almost infinitely cheaper than cleaning up a toxic waste spill.

In the global warming or climate change issue, preventing the problem is the best. That is where I believe energy efficiency is very important.

I have never quite understood why that has not caught on, because using energy more efficiently not only lessens environmental problems but improves the economy. You save money. Yet, people do not latch onto it in spite of proven effectiveness.

I think the EPA's green lights' program is a good example of that where, once the industry was shown they could install new, improved lighting systems with payback periods of one and a half to two years, they all did it, but no one had bothered to tell them about it.

I think that is one important factor that we as a Nation, and particularly as a government, should pursue.

Having said that, following up and I am sorry I missed part of Ms. Rivers' comments, and if this is duplicative feel free not to respond, or to make that comment, but first of all, Dr. Moore:

The historical evidence I think would certainly support your thesis that warmer climate has helped in many, many instances. The problem is, we now have an advanced civilization with many cities. along seaboards.

If in fact we do have any considerable global warming and rise in sea levels, it seems to me that is deleterious to today's world rather than advantageous. I would appreciate your comment on that.

Also, I wonder if you could just run through the very important point you were making because I think that is very crucial to our discussion today of the thousand-year decay time for getting CO2 out of the atmosphere versus the shorter time.

I am not sure, because you were rushed toward the end, that the panel really understood why you are talking about a much shorter time than most others are.

Finally, Drs. Watson and Corell, the other issue that I heard discussed as I walked in a minute ago, it came in also at the beginning of the hearing, and it is a concern of mine as a scientist.

I happen to think the peer review system is a very good system, but I am also concerned that what I have seen emerging in the last decade or perhaps even two decades upon occasion is what I would call politically correct science, that if somehow you are not doing politically correct science or your proposal is not politically correct, the chances of it getting funded are poorer and/or if you are already a government employee, you may suffer as Will Happer did. I happen to know Mr. Happer has worked in the same laboratory many, many years ago, very, very bright, very, very capable person and was treated, I think, very shabbily.

I recognize the administration had the right to replace him at any time, but the circumstances were such that it was obvious he was fired for disagreeing with some particular scientific belief.

So I would appreciate your comment on that, too, and I know Dr. Nierenberg as well is well acquainted with Will Happer too. He may want to get himself in trouble. Actually, you can't anymore, now that you are emeritus, but you may want to comment on the Happer episode, too.

So everyone here has a little question to answer except Mr. Gardiner.

Mr. Watson?

Dr. WATSON. With respect to the peer review system, I think whether it is actually as a funding agency-I used to be at NASA before I went to the White House-and with respect to peer review of a document like this, I think we are all trying very, very hard to get a wide range of peer reviews so that this issue of scientifically or politically correct is a non-issue.

I think science only progresses by getting that wide range of views, I think, such as the Chair of this committee has done. He has got a wide range of views at this table.

When we peer reviewed this document, we went through a very wide range of views-academia, government labs, industry scientists, business people, and governments all over the world, from Russia to Bangladesh to the United States

So, I think, whether you have tried to decide what research to fund or how to peer review this document, all of us believe in transparency and all of us believe in moving forward.

So I think, the system, while no system is perfect, is probably as good a system as we can develop at this moment in time. That is why, when we peer reviewed this document, we announced it in the Federal Register notice so any single individual in the United States who wanted to peer review it had the opportunity to peer review it.

Mr. CORELL. Why don't I stay on that topic. Let me just talk about it from the NSF perspective, and I think it is replicatable in the other agencies that work with directly with the scientific community.

Any single proposal that comes to the NSF is exposed to a variety of individuals who are technically competent in that field. We maintain a list, of some two or three hundred thousand individuals not only in the U.S. but elsewhere in the world who are part of the pool from which we select peer review.

We have a check on the system. Every single program at the National Science Foundation is reviewed by another group of individuals in what we call a committee of visitors, a program down at the level where grants are made, and every single jacket, a jacket is the set of documents associated with any award, every document is available to them and they do, in fact, on a sample basis go through them to assure us, the management, that every single effort has been done well, thoroughly, and carefully.

Further, if any individual believes they have not been thoughtfully handled in their proposal process, they may appeal it, and that appeal process has many levels, will come to me as the AD for the geosciences. I will then have another group of individuals that have nothing to do with the first cut look at that and counsel me as to whether the process was clean, if there were any irregularities.

After eight years at the National Science Foundation, I have not been exposed to one condition where I couldn't say that the process was clean.

If the individual is still unhappy, he can appeal to the director of the NSF.

So there is a whole variety of sets of checks and balances in the system to help us assure that the process is full and open.

I think one of the difficulties is that the pressure, the proposal pressure at the National Science Foundation and the other agencies, has increased dramatically during the last several, say, a decade. We had success ratios in the 30 to 50 percent region. We have success ratios in programs that are a few percent. The reason for that is the level of interest, the level of our scientific community's capability. A lot of those individuals do, in fact, have good research, it's just not possible to fund it all. And we have tried very carefully in making the final decision that no outside influence is brought to bear on the decision process.

I hope that gets at some of the issues that you raise, and if there aren't, please raise more.

Mr. BAKER. Mr. Chairman, can I donate my five minutes to finish up the questions here? I am not going to speak.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Without objection.

Mr. EHLERS. Thank you, Mr. Baker.

Dr. Nierenberg?

Mr. NIERENBERG. Mr. Chairman, actually, both of my remarks are personal. I really do appreciate Congressman Ehlers's statement about me. I have to say, in return, that I and my colleagues from Berkeley, the good old days, really are very proud of him and think you ought to be very grateful to have somebody as astute and wise as he where he is at.

The other personal remark is actually in direct response to the question. To enlarge on this question of lifetimes, you see, I perhaps overemphasize it because I made a very bad mistake in that ten years ago, you see, I was chairman of the National Academy of Science's major report on the subject, "Our Changing Climate,' which came out in 1983, and our science was very good. The report still stands, and it is still valuable, and not terribly much different in total from what you heard today. On all fronts we have moved ahead, including essentially all the topics you heard.

However, my attitude was different then because in the literature, and there was part of the literature I did not look behind, there were a number of articles, curves, that dwelt on the fact that it would take a thousand years or more, you see, for anthropological introduction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to dissipate. I just made the quite elementary remark immediately that then, you see, it would be hard to take any risk with major perturbations of our environment if, in fact, we do and have to sit around for a thousand years for it to dissipate. That is essentially what we call irreversible.

That colored my thinking. That colored my approach at the time, which meant that you sort of moved over to the, you know, smallest possible risk as a matter of great concern.

What happened is, well, I can tell you when my viewpoint changed, about four years ago. At first I didn't realize those numbers were pulled out of a hat. I can tell you where. The carbon at the bottom of the ocean is a thousand years old. It was that sort of argument. It is, incidentally.

What happened was the Germans in Hamburg came out with what I think is still the best model, possibly because it is the new