You Can Believe The Science Or You Can Believe The Senator With The Snowball

This happened on February 26 on the floor of the United States Senate.  The speaker is Senator James Inhofe (R-OK):


He's looking to disprove global warming by saying it's very cold outside in Washington DC.

Meanwhile in Anchorage Alaska, Monday saw record high temperatures (the average temp for that day is 30 °F and on Monday it was 43 °F.

Does this mean that global warming is occurring in Sarah Palin's abandoned state but not in our nation's capitol?

Luckily, another Senator produced some actual facts:


(Crooks and Liars has the transcript)

In his statement, Senator Whitehouse lists a number of groups/individuals who accept the science.  Here are his sources:

• NASA Earth Now website.
• Navy Admiral Samuel Locklear

  America’s top military officer in charge of monitoring hostile actions by North Korea, escalating tensions between China and Japan, and a spike in computer attacks traced to China provides an unexpected answer when asked what is the biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region: climate change.
  
  Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, in an interview at a Cambridge hotel Friday after he met with scholars at Harvard and Tufts universities, said significant upheaval related to the warming planet “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen . . . that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’

• US Conference of Catholic Bishops:

  The best evidence indicates that power plants are the largest stationary source of carbon emissions in the United States, and a major contributor to climate change.

• Coke and Pepsi:

  The Coca-Cola Company, for instance, has created a comprehensive “field-to-market” environmental program using climate-related data to quantify water use, fertilizer use, energy use, and greenhouse emissions. By the end of 2015, half of the company’s global corn supply will be part of this environmental program built around the reality of climate data.
  
  PepsiCo just announced the installation of a solar photovoltaic system that will supply massive amounts of renewable energy for the company’s Gatorade manufacturing operations in Tolleson, Arizona. Pepsi officials publicly describe the effort as a way of preventing the release of 50,000 tons of carbon and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Pepsi has said it will use data from this solar project to help inform future solar installations and projects so that it can reduce its greenhouse gas emissions globally.

• Ford Motor Company:

  Ford is committed to doing our share to prevent or reduce the potential for environmental, economic and social harm due to climate change.

• General Motors:

  GM asserts addressing climate change is not only good for the environment, it delivers tangible business value.

• Caterpillar:

  Caterpillar Inc. Chairman and CEO Jim Owens joined a diverse group of businesses and environmental organizations to call on U.S. policymakers to establish a mandatory emissions reduction program to address climate change.

• Wal-Mart:

  Wal-Mart, the planet’s largest retailer, has announced a plan to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and substantially procure large amounts of renewable energy globally.

• Target:

  The Corporate Sustainability team and the Energy and Sustainability team coordinate Target's climate change strategy, identify key initiative areas, assess risks and opportunities, and coordinate the company’s response to climate change.(pg 5)

• VF:

  VF Corporation (NYSE: VFC) is a global leader in branded lifestyle apparel, with more than 30 brands that reach consumers in nearly all channels of distribution and markets. At VF, we seek to conduct our business with the highest levels of honesty, integrity and respect. These values are embedded in our approach to sustainability, which reflects our commitment to operating our business so future generations can live with cleaner water and air, healthier forests and oceans, and a stable climate.

• Nike:

  Nike, which has more than 700 factories in 49 countries, many in Southeast Asia, is also speaking out because of extreme weather that is disrupting its supply chain. In 2008, floods temporarily shut down four Nike factories in Thailand, and the company remains concerned about rising droughts in regions that produce cotton, which the company uses in its athletic clothes.
  
  “That puts less cotton on the market, the price goes up, and you have market volatility,” said Hannah Jones, the company’s vice president for sustainability and innovation. Nike has already reported the impact of climate change on water supplies on its financial risk disclosure forms to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

• Mars:

  The consequences of climate change, such as changing temperatures and rainfall patterns, floods, droughts, and the spread of pests and diseases, are putting whole habitats and communities at risk.

• Nestlé:

  Increasing levels of anthropogenic green house gases (GHG) in the atmosphere are causing changes to the climate and thereby the ecosystems and processes upon which human prosperity is based. Of particular concern are changes to the weather patterns, water availability, and agricultural productivity, as well as the loss of biodiversity upon which much of the resilience of natural systems is built.

The Senator from Rhode Island added:

Every major American scientific society has put itself on record -- many of them a decade ago -- that climate change is deadly real. They measure it, they see it, they know why it happens, the predictions correlate with what we see as they increasingly come true.

And you can see a list of them here.

To paraphrase Senator Whitehouse:

So, you can believe NASA, The US Navy, The US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Coke, Pepsi, Ford, GM, Caterpillar, Wal-Mart, Target, VF, Nike, Mars, Nestlé and every major American scientific society, or you can believe the Senator With The Snowball.

Well?  Do you believe the science or the senator and his snowball?

More Faith-Based Anti-Science On The Way

From The Washington Post:

Sen. James M. Inhofe, an the Oklahoma Republican who once compared the Environmental Protection Agency to the Gestapo, is likely to lead the Environment and Public Works Committee when the GOP takes control of the Senate next year.

And then there's this:

In his 2012 book, “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future,” Inhofe describes himself as a lonely crusader against an environmental-liberal conspiracy. “First I stood alone in saying that anthropogenic [man-made] catastrophic global warming is a hoax,” he wrote.

And let's not forget where at least some of teh crazie comes from:

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) appeared on Voice of Christian Youth America’s radio program Crosstalk with Vic Eliason yesterday to promote his new book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, where he repeated his frequent claim that human influenced climate change is impossible because “God’s still up there.” Inhofe cited Genesis 8:22 to claim that it is “outrageous” and arrogant for people to believe human beings are “able to change what He is doing in the climate.”

This is Genesis 8:22:

As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night,
shall not cease.’

Yes, that's right. That's why all the science is wrong.

Senator James Inhofe, the picture of the the GOP's faith-based non-science.

More Science Denial By The GOP

This happened yesterday in the United States Senate:

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) blocked Senate Democrats on Monday from passing a resolution that would have acknowledged the reality of climate change.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked unanimous consent to pass S.Res. 524, which is a measure that expresses the sense of the Senate that climate change is occurring and poses a risk to the United States. But Inhofe objected.

Where else but amongst American Conservatives (yes, I know - not ALL of them, but enough for the rest of them to be ashamed) can a resolution acknowledging reality be so easily blocked?

Luckily, there was someone in the Senate (a New Englander, thankyouverymuch) who responded to the ignorance with some science.  From thinkprogress:

[Rhode Island Senator Sheldon] Whitehouse began by addressing one of Inhofe’s most oft-used arguments against the existence of climate change — that the earth’s atmospheric temperature has not risen in the last 15 years.

That “little rhetorical device” Inhofe is using fails to consider two things, Whitehouse said. One, is that more than 90 percent of the heat generated from increased carbon emissions gets absorbed into the ocean, not into the atmosphere. Two, is that any changes in ocean temperature will eventually have “a pronounced effect” on atmospheric temperature. Indeed, recent studies show that global temperatures are set to rise rapidly in the face of our increasingly warm and acidic oceans.

“To say that we have no warming is just not factual,” he said.

You can watch Senator Inhofe get some science by Senator Whitehouse:


Here's the 2014 National Climate Assessment if you want to read it.

But If It's A HOAX...

Our good friends on the other side of the political aisle (aka the anti-science wing of the GOP) are usually more than happy to proclaim the science of climate change to be a hoax.  For instance, Senator Inhofe some time ago called it the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" and more recently P-G columnist Jack Kelly wrote that it was "the most harmful hoax" in history.

 But if it is indeed a hoax then why is the Defense Science Board looking into it?

From DiscoveryNews.com:

The United States' Department of Defense needs to know more about how climate change affects global security, recommends a report by the the department's science advisers, the Defense Science Board (DSB).

Why waste all that time (and money) looking into something that Climategate proved to be a fraud?

Here's the report, if you wanted to read it yourself.

If this general argument of mine looks familiar, it's because it is.  I made it way back in August, 2009.  Then it was the National Intelligence Council - from the last months of the Bush Administration.

Still not a hoax.

For The Climategate Files

Way back in late November 2009, Republican Senator James Inhofe announced on (of course) Fox "News" that he was calling for an investigation into the so-called Climategate emails.

Take a look (the announcement is about 3 minutes in):


And in late May of 2010, he sent a letter to the Inspector General of the Department of Commerce requesting an investigation. He also requested an investigation into Dr. Jane Lubchenco. You remember Lubchenco, right? She was quoted recently by the editorial board of the Tribune-Review. Inhofe was apparently unhappy about her testimony to Congress when she said:

The [CRU] emails really do nothing to undermine the very strong scientific consensus and the independent scientific analyses ofthousands of scientists around the world that tell us that the earth is warming and that the warming is largely a result of human activities. "

Which is the truth, apparently, but apparently annoyed Inhofe nonetheless.

So what happened with the investigation? You guessed it. From The Hill:

A Commerce Department inspector general investigation into the “Climategate” controversy finds that government scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration did not manipulate climate change data.

It’s the latest investigation to clear scientists of manipulating climate data after thousands of e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit were leaked in 2009.

“Climategate” has become something of a rallying call for climate skeptics, who have pointed to the e-mails to suggest there is a conspiracy among the world’s scientists. But a slew of investigations into the e-mails have cleared scientists of any wrongdoing.

Something we probably won't be seeing anytime soon on the Trib's Op-Ed page. The same Op-Ed page that only last November published:

If the work of blame-mankind climate "scientists" were unimpeachable, they wouldn't be gearing up for a charm offensive.

Seven hundred global-warming doomsayers have agreed to defend their dubious "science" publicly under the auspices of the American Geophysical Union. And 39 Chicken Littles have signed up for a separate "climate rapid response team" organized by a professor at Minnesota's St. Thomas University for deployment to radio and TV talk shows.

Both efforts smack of increasing desperation fueled by the blame-mankind crowd's credibility crumbling beneath the weight of the scandalous Climategate e-mails, which show data manipulation, and greater public recognition of their leftist big-government agenda. That's why skeptics of global-warming orthodoxy make up half of the new GOP members just elected to Congress.

But I digress.

Here's the report Inhofe requested. And the jackpot:

In our review of the CRU emails, we did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data comprising the GHCN-M dataset or failed to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures. In addition, we found no evidence to suggest that NOAA was non-compliant with the IQA or the Shelby Amendment.

And let me write that again: No evidence NOAA inappropriately manipulated the data.

Will Senator Inhofe be making an announcement to that effect on Fox "News"? Will Scaife's braintrust?

We won't be holding our breath.