In a hearing that was part sparring match and part high school science lesson, two of the Obama administration's climate change experts, John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco, testified today before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming about the validity of man-made climate change.

From the start, Republicans focused the conversation on the controversial hacked e-mails from East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit in England, in which a number of scientists made remarks about limiting the dissemination of work by climate change skeptics. The research center provides data for much of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's conclusions. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, was among the scientists involved in the e-mails.

"When the science itself it politicized it becomes impossible to make objective scientific decisions," said ranking member James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis. He used his opening statements to quote from several of the e-mails, and said they "read more like scientific fascism than scientific process."

Holdren modified his testimony to address those concerns, arguing several times throughout the more than two-hour hearing that the controversy would not affect the scientific consensus about human-induced climate change. "This particular case, the data set in question and the way it was interpreted and presented by these particular scientists, constitutes a small part of the data and analysis," Holdren said.

Republicans expressed dismay at not being allowed to call in their own witnesses, and requested that a second hearing be held focusing on "Climategate." Calls from Sullivan to launch an investigation into the issue were dismissed by Holdren. "I'm not sure that an independent investigation, if you mean by the Congress of the United States, is the best way to get to the scientific truth," Holdren said. Instead, he said that the system of peer review among scientists would best solve the dispute, and that scientists had already begun that process.

The heated debate split the committee on partisan lines. Republicans cited the e-mails as evidence that the science of climate change is not unequivocal. Rep. John Sullivan, R-Okla., said the controversy unveiled a "climate of corruption within the scientific community." For their part, Democrats on the panel chided climate skeptics for not accepting the evidence and scientific consensus of anthropogenic global warming. Chairman Edward Markey, D-Mass., likened denying man-made global warming to Major League Baseball denying the effects of steroids on its players.

During her testimony, Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, addressed a second major problem resulting from elevated levels of carbon dioxide: the acidification of the oceans. She accompanied her testimony with visual demonstrations reminiscent of a high school chemistry class to show how carbon dioxide acidifies water and how that acidity affects calcium composites, such as clam and oyster shells.

"I emphasize that climate change is not a theory," Lubchenco said. "It is a series of documented observations about the world."

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