Climate myths at the U.S. House Hearing on climate change
by John Cook, Skeptical Science, April 5, 2011
On March 31, 2011, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science Space and Technology held a hearing on Climate Change: Examining the Processes Used to Create Science and Policy. There was a breathtaking (but not altogether surprising) amount of climate misinformation provided both by the Republican politicians and the skeptic [denialist] scientists they invited as witnesses. Much credit goes to Dana Nuccitelli who went to the trouble of transcribing all of the misinformation (full video of the event is viewable here). Here is a collection of the climate myth quotes from the politicians and scientists (which have been added to our Climate Myths from Politicians):[Readers, I am including only John Christy, to begin with, because his statements are some of the most ridiculous; please go to the link below to see all the others. Also, John Cook is much too polite, so I will sprinkle in a few choice comments, here and there.]
| What the Science Says | ||
| "[the hockey stick] was the icon of the TAR, the Third Assessment Report, and what the tree ring record did, in showing it did not agree with temperatures, indicated that the icon itself, which was based primarily on tree rings prior to the 16th century, was therefore not very good at explaining what the temperature was." [he is talking about only one set of trees whose rings appear to show cooling after 1960, except, guess what? Actual thermometers showed that temperatures were actually going up -- the whole thing is a non-issue picked to death by denialists in order to confuse the public. Temperatures went up, whether or not the tree rings showed it or not. ] | Recent studies agree that recent global temperatures are unprecedented in the last 1000 years. | ||
| "I think I might like it warmer actually" [oh yeah, then let him go hang around in Northern Siberia while all the methane comes out of the permafrost -- maybe he would like to try to plant some soybeans up there while he is at it] | Negative impacts of global warming on agriculture, health & environment far outweigh any positives. | ||
| "the natural unforced variability...the complexity of the system itself can create these variations [like today's warming] on its own" | Multiple sets of independent observations find a human fingerprint on climate change. | ||
| "When you look at the possibility of natural unforced variability, you see that can cause excursions that we've seen recently" | No known natural forcing fits the fingerprints of observed warming except anthropogenic greenhouse gases. | ||
| "I think there's been too much jumping to conclusions about seeing something happening in the climate and saying 'well the only way that can happen is human effects'" [what a jerk -- just waves away thousands of research studies and the years of dedicated hard work by hundreds of scientists] | Multiple sets of independent observations find a human fingerprint on climate change. | ||
| "I think the consistency [between now and 1970s cooling predictions]...there's a large amount of ignorance about the climate system." [now he is totally lying since he knows good and well that scientists did not predict cooling in the 1970s -- that myth came about due to the press misinterpreting and exaggerating research at the time that said no such thing] | Very few studies predicted global cooling in the 1970s, whereas virtually every study today predicts global warming | ||
| "I can say that there certainly hasn't been a warming of temperatures since [1998]." [maybe he should have a look at Greenland where temperatures were above freezing through the end of December and the melt was gobsmacking] | The global warming trend has continued since 1998. | ||
| "I think most of all, [current temperatures] are part of the normal ups and downs of climate." [you can't say "I think" without backing it up with evidence, and he sure can't back that up] | Multiple sets of independent observations find a human fingerprint on climate change. | ||
| "If you go back through the entire history of the world, most of the periods have not been cooler than today, they've been warmer." [whoa! another distortion, maybe we should go back to when the world was really hot many millions of years ago, but wait, humans can't exist at those temperatures] | Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time; humans are now the dominant forcing. | ||
| "Greenland ice borehole temperatures...indicated a clear 500 year period of temperatures warmer than the present centered around 900 AD commonly referred to as the Medieval Warm Period." [total lie! oh, and in case you don't already know this, the Vikings never grew any grapes on Greenland and they did not make any wine -- they had to import it!] | Globally averaged temperature now is higher than global temperature in medieval times. | ||
| "you're looking at most at a tenth of a degree [reduction in global temperature] after 100 years [if USA imposes CO2 limits]" | If every nation agrees to limit CO2 emissions, we can achieve significant cuts on a global scale. | ||
| "In this sense yes [1970s cooling predictions were similar to current warming predictions], our ignorance about the climate system is just enormous" | The vast majority of climate papers in the 1970s predicted warming. | ||
| "climate model output does not match up to the real world" | Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean. | ||
| "this issue has policy implications that may potentially raise the price of energy a lot, and thus essentially the price of everything else." | The benefits of a price on carbon outweigh the costs several times over. | ||
| "the EPA overstated the agreement between models and observations, when in fact there was significant disagreement." | Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean. | ||
| "Evidence was presented by Dr. Ross McKitrick [he's talking about another debunked denialist] and others indicated the popular surface temperature data sets were affected by warming not likely to be caused by greenhouse gases." | Urban and rural regions show the same warming trend. | ||
| "The hockey stick's author was the same IPCC lead author who in my opinion worked with a small group of cohorts...allowing amputation of a disagreeable result, and the splicing of unrelated data to 'hide the decline'." [he's sandwiching things here -- one had nothing to do with the other and both were honest, nothing fishy at all] | The "decline" in tree-ring density was not present in the "hockey stick", and was only "hidden" in other separate work because scientists knew it did not accurately represent recent temperature trends. | ||
| "The hockey stick's author was the same IPCC lead author who in my opinion worked with a small group of cohorts and misrepresented the temperature record of the past 1,000 years by promoting his own result" | Recent studies agree that recent global temperatures are unprecedented in the last 1000 years. | ||
| "IPCC-selected lead authors are given significant control over the text, including the authority to judge their own work against the work of their critics...this process has led to the propagation of incorrect and misleading information in the assessments, and thus should lead you to question the IPCC's general support for a catastrophic view of climate change."[you know, at this point I have to think that Christy is really suffering from sour grapes because his own work is full of errors and he publishes crap with other denialist authors. Too bad they let him be a lead author. I hope that mistake is not made again.] | The IPCC summarizes the recent research by leading scientific experts. |
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