Arguments
Climate myths at the U.S. House Hearing on climate change
Posted on 5 April 2011 by John Cook
On March 31, 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 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 myths quotes from the politicians and scientists (which have been added to our Climate Myths from Politicians):
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What the Science Says | ||
| "if [CO2 limits] had passed...do you think the economic damage created by that bill would have been worth the carbon emissions decrease it was estimated to have achieved?" |
The benefits of a price on carbon outweigh the costs several times over. |
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| "if we were in the US to bring our carbon emissions down to zero within 20 years, and invest all of this even though countries such as China and India and EU do not, there would not be much of a difference in what is going on today" |
If every nation agrees to limit CO2 emissions, we can achieve significant cuts on a global scale. |
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| "Does the so-called danger posed to the economy by not acting to reduce what some may call man-made effects on climate change outweigh the economic costs to the country?" |
The benefits of a price on carbon outweigh the costs several times over. |
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What the Science Says | ||
| "I work with Willie Soon, who does a lot of research on this particular topic, and that's what he tells me [that natural factors are causing global warming]" | Multiple sets of independent observations find a human fingerprint on climate change. | ||
| "The [IPCC] temperature forecasting procedures are improper...these alarming forecasts..." | The IPCC summarizes the recent research by leading scientific experts. | ||
| "Forecasting global warming lacks any scientific basis." | Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean. | ||
| "The most appropriate evidence-based forecast is that there will be no long-term warming claim." |
There are many lines of evidence indicating global warming is unequivocal. |
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What the Science Says | ||
| "we're being asked to undermine America's economy based on this guesswork speculation" |
The benefits of a price on carbon outweigh the costs several times over. |
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| "nobody knows whether we're going to have global cooling or global warming over the next half century or century" | Weather is chaotic but climate is driven by Earth's energy imbalance, which is more predictable. | ||
| "Would it be fair to say then, that in the scientific community, it literally is asking too much of them for them to be able to tell us whether 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now, Earth's temperatures are going to be warmer or cooler, much like it is pretty unreasonable to ask a meteorologist whether we're going to have rain in Washington just 2 or 3 weeks from now?" | Weather and climate are different; climate predictions do not need weather detail. | ||
| "I couldn't help but pull up the Time magazine front page article dated April 28th, 1975 where we have a penguin on the cover and it says "How to Survive the Coming Ice Age". How do you compare that global cooling claim versus today's global warming claim?" | The vast majority of climate papers in the 1970s predicted warming. | ||
| "the last 4 or 5 years, have they been cooler or warmer?" |
Global temperature is still rising and 2010 was the hottest recorded. |
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| "would it be fair to say then that there has been a cooling of global temperatures at least over the last 13 years compared to 1998?" | The last decade 2000-2009 was the hottest on record. | ||
| "The temperatures we're experiencing now, do you consider them to be an aberration, or just a part of the Earth's natural warming and cooling cycle?" | No known natural forcing fits the fingerprints of observed warming except anthropogenic greenhouse gases. | ||
| "pretty much the one constant about the weather is that it's always changing...Looking at the Earth's past climatological data, have their been cooler periods than we're not experiencing?" | Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time; humans are now the dominant forcing. | ||
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What the Science Says | ||
| "The desperate emails of a computer programmer offer us a glimpse into the data control issues at CRU" |
A number of investigations have cleared scientists of any wrongdoing in the media-hyped email incident. |
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| "would you trust data from individuals trying to "hide the decline"?" | "hide the decline" was simply an effort by climate scientists to only use tree ring data which they were confident accurately reflects local temperatures, and was widely & openly discussed in the scientific literature. | ||
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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." | Recent studies agree that recent global temperatures are unprecedented in the last 1000 years. | ||
| "I think I might like it warmer actually" | 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'" | 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." | 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]." | 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." | 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." | 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." | 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. |
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| "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. |
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| "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 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'." | 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." | The IPCC summarizes the recent research by leading scientific experts. | ||
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What the Science Says | ||
| "If everybody, if all the United States we go totally green, but other countries throughout this world don't follow suit, can you tell me what kind of tick that's even going to put in the CO2 emissions?" |
If every nation agrees to limit CO2 emissions, we can achieve significant cuts on a global scale. |
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| "back when I was graduating from high school I remember the "great global cooling". Is this "great global cooling" similar to the great global warming that is going on today?" | The vast majority of climate papers in the 1970s predicted warming. | ||
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What the Science Says | ||
| "Climategate showed that either EPA's investigation of the IPCC's procedures was wanting, or the IPCC had departed from those procedures." |
A number of investigations have cleared scientists of any wrongdoing in the media-hyped email incident. |
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| "Over the last century, as anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased...every relevant indicator of public health and welfare has improved dramatically around the world rather than deteriorated." | Negative impacts of global warming on agriculture, health & environment far outweigh any positives. | ||
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What the Science Says | ||
| "Dr. Holdren's testimony was that sea level would rise 12 feet" | Sea level will rise several meters if sufficient land-based ice melts. | ||
| "The leaked emails from the University of East Angeles [sic] Climate Research Unit in the November of 2009 revealed that the scientists most vocal about the effects humans were having on the climate...were not following accepted scientific practices." |
A number of investigations have cleared scientists of any wrongdoing in the media-hyped email incident. |
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What the Science Says | ||
| "even if all of the climate science was accepted as good science, we still need to worry about the bad economics and bad policy analysis that had been used to leap from conclusions - to leap to conclusions about what should be done from that basis." |
The benefits of a price on carbon outweigh the costs several times over. |
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| "it's a wholesale change in the entire world's energy system that you commit yourself to when you say we're going to go for preventing global warming" | Scientific studies have determined that current technology is sufficient to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to avoid dangerous climate change. | ||
| "the costs of [CO2 limits] by itself would have far outweighed any benefit we could have gotten from those changes" |
The benefits of a price on carbon outweigh the costs several times over. |
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| "We would not notice a difference to the US to anything that was happening to us because of climate [if we introduce CO2 limits]" |
If every nation agrees to limit CO2 emissions, we can achieve significant cuts on a global scale. |
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| "clearly climate change regulations will diminish [economic productivity]" |
The benefits of a price on carbon outweigh the costs several times over. |
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| "No, [the danger posed to the economy by not acting to reduce climate change] does not [outweigh the economic costs to the country of CO2 limits]" |
The benefits of a price on carbon outweigh the costs several times over. |
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| "the Waxman-Markey [climate] bill with costs in the range of $1,000-2,000 per household, a loss of 1-2% of GDP of what it would be otherwise, and perhaps close to a doubling of electricity prices" | Numerous independent economic analyses concluded that Waxman-Markey would have resulted in minimal costs to American families, less than 1% reduction of GDP, and virtually no change to electric bills. | ||
| "US emission reductions are likely to have costs far greater than their benefits" |
The benefits of a price on carbon outweigh the costs several times over. |
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| "efforts to reduce our own emissions would make almost no difference to global temperature" |
If every nation agrees to limit CO2 emissions, we can achieve significant cuts on a global scale. |
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What the Science Says | ||
| "Luis Alvarez taught me the fundamental scientific rule, which is you've got to show everybody your dirty laundry...My problem with the way the hockey stick was derived was that there was none of this...if you hide something...the person you are most likely to fool is yourself." | Nothing was hidden in Mann's "hockey stick"; "hide the decline" refers to tree ring data which was a very minor component of the "hockey stick", and the "decline" was discussed extensively in the peer-reviewed literature | ||
| "claims that global warming has harmed the Earth so far are not scientific" | Negative impacts of global warming on agriculture, health & environment far outweigh any positives. | ||
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What the Science Says | ||
| "There was a period that we call this 'Medieval Warming Period...and it was warmer then" | Globally averaged temperature now is higher than global temperature in medieval times. | ||
| "There was a period that we call this 'Medieval Warming Period', is there any suggestion that that was caused by an increased level of CO2, especially by human beings, and if not...and it was warmer then, how can we then say scientifically that today's cycle that seems to be a little bit warming anyway, was caused by CO2?" | Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time; humans are now the dominant forcing. | ||
| "Do you believe the Sun and natural causes may have more to do with cycles the Earth is going through, including the current one, than mankind's use of fossil fuel?" | No known natural forcing fits the fingerprints of observed warming except anthropogenic greenhouse gases. | ||
| "Do you believe the Sun and natural causes may have more to do with cycles the Earth is going through, including the current one, than mankind's use of fossil fuel?" | In the last 35 years of global warming, sun and climate have been going in opposite directions | ||
| "the phrase "case closed"...is nothing more than an attempt to shut off debate and honest discussion" | That human CO2 is causing global warming is known with high certainty & confirmed by observations. |
However, there was one bright spot at the hearing: the testimony from climate scientist Kerry Emanuel also testified at the event. (available on YouTube and embedded below). His closing words are particularly poignant and worth dwelling on:
"We properly revere our forefathers for making material and mortal sacrifices for our benefit. One only hopes that our descendants will hold us in similar regard."
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