What does an environmental scientist do?

What was this story about a scientist contacting another one?

• NewYorkerFilter: my friend is trying to identify a feature about a writer trying to contact her father's rival. From the friend: "I've been trying to find this New Yorker piece I remember reading about a scientist in which the scientist wouldn't respond to the writer's messages, and the writer (a woman) wonders if maybe it's because the scientist disliked her father, who was also a famous scientist in the same field with opposing views. She leaves a series of increasingly desperate messages, but only after she gets her editor involved does the scientist agree to talk to her. Would have ran between 2005ish and 2010ish. (Possibly might have been in Harper's or The Atlantic.)"

• Answer:

  Was it Rivka Galchen's piece http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/disaster-aversion/ from the October 2009 issue of Harper's? In it, she writes about trying to contact Dr. Ross Hoffman, who knew her father, meteorologist Tzvi Gal-Chen (the relevant section starts on http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/disaster-aversion/4/).