Congressman and Michael Mann battle over ‘Stalinist tactics’ in ‘global warming’ debate
…AP’s Borenstein calls out Michael Mann for a whopper: ‘Mann said he didn’t call Curry a denier. But in his written testimony he called Curry ‘a climate science denier’
…Scientist tells Congress: Obama science czar ‘put a target’ on my back due to ‘my heretical view’ on climate
Hearing – Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method
US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
March 29, 2017
Full Congressional Statement of Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. here:
In early 2014, not long after I appeared before Congress, President Obama’s science adviser John Holdren testified before the same Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He was asked about his public statements that appeared to contradict the scientific consensus on extreme weather events that I had earlier presented. Mr. Holdren responded with the all-too-common approach of attacking the messenger, telling the senators incorrectly that my views were “not representative of the mainstream scientific opinion.” Mr. Holdren followed up by posting a strange essay, of nearly 3,000 words, on the White House website under the heading, “An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr.,” where it remains today.
I suppose it is a distinction of a sort to be singled out in this manner by the president’s science adviser. Yet Mr. Holdren’s screed reads more like a dashed-off blog post from the nutty wings of the online climate debate, chock-full of errors and misstatements.
But when the White House puts a target on your back on its website, people notice. Almost a year later Mr. Holdren’s missive was the basis for an investigation of me by Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee. Rep. Grijalva explained in a letter to my university’s president that I was being investigated because Mr. Holdren had “highlighted what he believes were serious misstatements by Prof. Pielke of the scientific consensus on climate change.” He made the letter public. The “investigation” turned out to be a farce. In the letter, Rep. Grijalva suggested that I— and six other academics with apparently heretical views—might be on the payroll of Exxon Mobil (or perhaps the Illuminati, I forget). He asked for records detailing my research funding, emails and so on. After some well-deserved criticism from the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union, Rep. Grijalva deleted the
letter from his website. The University of Colorado complied with Rep. Grijalva’s request and responded that I have never received funding from fossil-fuel companies. My heretical views can be traced to research support from the U.S. government.
But the damage to my reputation had been done, and perhaps that was the point. Studying and engaging on climate change had become decidedly …
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. Tells Congress: ‘I experienced an organized effort of delegitimization’ for climate dissent
Hearing – Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method
US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
March 29, 2017
Full Congressional Statement of Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. here:
My Recent Experiences Where Science Meets Politics
Despite publishing many peer reviewed papers on a wide range of climate-related topics with colleagues around the world and having my research included in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC),1
I experienced an organized effort of delegitimization by members of Congress and the White House, supported by their political
allies in the media and in well-funded advocacy groups. These efforts were successful in that they resulted in me re-orienting my academic career away from climate-related research.
Here are some specifics of my experiences over the past few years:
Several months after I testified before this committee in December, 2013, the White House posted on its website a 6-page essay by the President’s Science Advisor,
John Holdren, which claimed falsely that my testimony before this committee was “not representative of mainstream views on this topic in the climate-science community” and was “seriously misleading.”2
Science advisor Holdren’s false claims were put forward even though my testimony was drawn from and consistent with the most recent reports of the IPCC. I have for decades supported the scientific assessment process of the IPCC and did so explicitly in my 2013 Congressional testimony.
One year later, Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) opened a formal investigation of me and six other professors (three of us are testifying here today). In his letter to my university’s president, Mr. Grijalva justified the investigation of me by relying on the science advisor’s false claims: “John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, has highlighted what he believes were serious misstatements by Prof. Pielke of the scientific consensus on climate change,” and cited Dr. Holdren’s essay on the White House website.3
In his letter, Mr. Grijalva introduced another false implication — that I, and the other academics, had “potential conflicts of interest and failure to disclose corporate funding sources.”4 Mr. Grijalva’s letter cited Exxon Mobil and the Koch Foundation as possible sources of undisclosed funding that I may have received.
The communications director for the House Natural Resources Committee explained how we seven academics were chosen to be investigated by Mr. Grijalva: “The way we chose the list …
Climatologist Dr. John Christy tells Congress: ‘Consensus Science is not Science’
Hearing – Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method
US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
March 29, 2017
Full Congressional Statement here:
Red Teams needed because Consensus Science is not Science
One way for congress to receive better (less biased) information about claims of climate science is to organize “Red Teams” as is done in other parts of government and industry when critical systems, programs or infrastructure are under consideration. I have discussed this idea is several previous congressional hearings. I will include here the section describing Red Teams from my testimony on 20 Sep 2012 before the Subcommittee on Energy and Power of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
The term “consensus science” will often be appealed to regarding arguments about climate change to bolster an assertion. This is a form of “argument from authority.” Consensus, however, is a political notion, not a scientific notion. As I testified to the
Inter-Academy Council in June 2010, wrote in Nature that same year (Christy 2010), and documented in my written House Testimony last year (House Space, Science and Technology, 31 Mar 2011) the IPCC and other similar Assessments do not represent for
me a consensus of much more than the consensus of those selected to agree with a particular consensus. The content of these climate reports is actually under the control of a relatively small number of individuals – I often refer to them as the “climate
establishment” – who through the years, in my opinion, came to act as gatekeepers of scientific opinion and information, rather than brokers. The voices of those of us who object to various statements and emphases in these assessments are by-in-large dismissed
rather than accommodated. This establishment includes the same individuals who become the “experts” called on to promote IPCC claims in government reports such as the Endangerment Finding by the Environmental Protection Agency. As outlined in my [31 Mar 2011] House Testimony, these “experts” become the authors and evaluators of their own research relative to research which challenges their work. But with the luxury of having the “last word” as “expert” authors of the reports, alternative views vanish.
I’ve often stated that climate science is a “murky” science. We do not have laboratory methods of testing our hypotheses as many other sciences do. As a result what passes for science includes, opinion, arguments-from-authority, dramatic press releases, and …
Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry slams ‘manufactured consensus’ of ‘global warming’
Hearing – Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method
US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
March 29, 2017
Full Congressional Statement here:
Motivated by the mandate from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the climate community has prematurely elevated a scientific hypothesis on human-caused climate change to a ruling theory through claims of a consensus.
• Premature theories enforced by an explicit consensus building process harm scientific progress because of the questions that don’t get asked and the investigations that aren’t undertaken. As a result, we lack the kinds of information to more broadly understand climate variability and societal vulnerabilities.
• Challenges to climate research have been exacerbated by:
o Unreasonable expectations from policy makers
o Scientists who are playing power politics with their expertise and trying to silence scientific disagreement through denigrating scientist who do not agree with them
o Professional societies that oversee peer review in professional journals are writing policy statements endorsing the consensus and advocating for specific policies
• Policymakers bear the responsibility of the mandate that they give to panels of scientific experts. The UNFCCC framed the climate change problem too narrowly and demanded of the IPCC too much precision – where complexity, chaos, disagreement and the level of current understanding resists such precision.
• A more disciplined logic is needed in the climate change assessment process that identifies the most
important uncertainties and introduces a more objective assessment of confidence levels.
‘Scientifically proven’ is a contradiction in terms – science does not prove anything. Scientists have a vision of reality that is the best they have found so far, and there may be substantial disagreement among individual scientists. Science works just fine when there is more than one hypothesis to explain something – in fact, disagreement spurs scientific progress through creative tension and efforts to resolve the
disagreement.
How scientists fool themselves
Prior to 2010, I accepted and supported the consensus conclusions from the Assessment Reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – I felt that this was the responsible thing to do. However, following the revelations of ClimateGate,4 I realized that I had fallen victim to ‘groupthink’ – a pattern of thought characterized by conformity to group values and the manufacture of
consensus that results in self-deception. I undertook an investigation into the ways that scientists can fool themselves, by examining …
The Hits Keep Coming! Trump EPA climate move risks unraveling UN Paris commitments
BY DEVIN HENRY – 03/29/17 06:00 AM EDT
President Trump’s climate change order has thrown a wrench into the Paris climate deal.
Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order undoing most of the major climate work Barack Obama pursued as president.
The order didn’t touch the Paris agreement, an international pact on greenhouse gas emissions that Obama pursued aggressively during his second term. But it begins the process of ending the electricity-sector pollution regulation Obama said would help fulfill U.S. commitments, a decision that underlines Trump’s dismissal of the agreement.
There is internal debate in the Trump administration about the importance of staying in the Paris deal. But Tuesday’s order — and other measures Trump has advanced during his presidency — indicates he’s ready to leave it behind, formally or not.
“The runner is going to keep moving forward, but someone is on the edge of the track throwing all sorts of objects in the way.”
Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the Clean Power Plan in 2015. It aims to cut pollution from the electricity sector as a way to help achieve Obama’s ambitious goal in the Paris agreement: a 26 percent to 28 percent reduction in total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025
Trump’s Tuesday order only mandates a review of the Clean Power Plan. But he and his administration aggressively oppose it, indicating it’s likely to come off the books after the review.
Undoing the regulation would undermine federal efforts to meet Obama’s Paris goal, unraveling the U.S. commitments under the pact.
“Without the Clean Power Plan, it will be impossible to achieve the U.S. [pledge] under the Paris agreement,” Robert Stavins, the director of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, said in an email. “It would have been difficult even with the Clean Power Plan.”
Trump’s climate order emboldened critics of the Paris deal.
“I think the U.S. ought to withdraw from the climate agreement in Paris,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said on Tuesday.
“I think it was a mistake by President Obama, and since he chose not to bring it to the Senate for confirmation, it’s clearly not a treaty, so I’m for withdrawing from it completely.”
Trump’s industry allies, while praising the details of the order …
Liberals Claim Trump ‘Signed Death Warrant for Planet Earth,’ Began ‘Extinction of Human Life’
As soon as President Donald Trump signed an executive order to eliminate climate-related environmental regulations burdening the U.S. energy industry, liberals pounced on the chance to declare the end of life as we know it.
“The extinction of human life on Earth” has begun, liberal filmmaker Michael Moore Tweeted, claiming that historians will soon look back on this day and blame Trump’s executive orders for their demise:
Moore was widely mocked on Twitter for saying humans will be extinct, but human historians would still be alive to blame their extinction on Trump.
Former environmental advisor to President Barack Obama, Van Jones, used Twitter to declare that Trump had just signed the planet’s “death warrant.”
And, Rep. Darren Soto (D-Florida) took to Twitter to claim that his entire state – including Trump’s Mar-a-lago club – will soon be submerged:
Warmist Michael Mann tells whopper at congressional science hearing?
Testifying before Congress, climate scientist Michael Mann denies any affiliation or association to the Climate Accountability Institute despite his apparent membership on the Institute’s Council of Advisors.
CONGRESSMAN CLAY HIGGINS: “Are you affiliated or associated with an organization called The Climate Accountability Institute?”
DR. MICHAEL MANN: “No. I mean I may have corresponded with people.”
CONGRESSMAN CLAY HIGGINS: “You’re not affiliated nor associated with them?”
DR. MICHAEL MANN: “I can provide– I’ve submitted my CV you can see who I’m associated with and who I am not.”
Hearing – Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method
US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
March 29, 2017
But a link to Climate Accountability Institute’s website features Michael Mann as one of the groups’ ‘Council of Advisors.”
http://climateaccountability.org/about.html
Update: March 31, 2017: James Delingpole of Brietbart reports Mann’s own CV lists his role
Mann told the Congressional hearing he had no association or affiliation with the Climate Accountability Institute (one of the numerous ad hoc organisations formed in order to give the harassment of climate sceptics an air of scientific credibility).
Yet according to his CV he sits on the Climate Accountability Institute’s advisory board and has done since 2014. (Mann’s CV states: “Advisory Board, Climate Accountability Institute, 2014-“
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Related Information:
Michael Mann’s Affiliation with Climate Accountability Institute
As of July 2014, Mann appears as a member of the Board of Advisors of the Climate Accountability Institute (CAI) on the organization’s website. His affiliation connects him directly with the organized efforts to prosecute climate skeptics via RICO statutes, which got its start with Naomi Oreskes, co-founder of CAI.
RICO, the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization, is a law designed to battle organized crime, but was later used in civil cases, particularly against tobacco companies that were subject to billion-dollar lawsuits to compensate for the health problems of their customers. Oreskes conflated tobacco with fossil fuels, seeking to enforce penalties sufficient to destroy the fossil fuel industry through prosecution of both producers and advocates, particularly climate skeptics.
Mann’s affiliation with this effort indicates his dedication to prosecute “deniers.” (The environmental left has chosen this term specifically to equate those skeptical of catastrophic man-caused global warming to Holocaust deniers. Mann refuses to use the term “skeptic.” ) Mann’s allegiance to prosecution for skeptics is symbolized by his advisory status with …
Scientist to Congress: ‘No evidence’ that hurricanes, floods, droughts, tornadoes are increasing
Testifying before Congress, environmental studies expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. says the UN IPCC’s own data shows there’s “no evidence to suggest” that hurricanes, floods, droughts, or tornadoes are increasing.
DR. ROGER PIELKE JR: “In the United States the number of hurricanes and the intensity of hurricanes is down by 20 percent since 1900. I don’t put a lot of stock in that because you can start at different dates and get different trends but the point is that there is no evidence to suggest that hurricanes, either in the U.S. or globally, are increasing and the same goes for floods, drought, and tornado. And, don’t believe me. You can look at the appendix that I provided with data from the IPCC. So why people would hang their hat on long term trends in extreme weather is a puzzle.”
Hearing – Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method
US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
March 29, 2017
From Pielke Jr.’s Written Testimony:
“There is little scientific basis in support of claims that extreme weather events – specifically, hurricanes, floods, drought, tornadoes – and their economic damage have increased in recent decades due to the emission of greenhouse gases. In fact, since 2013 the world and the United States have had a remarkable stretch of good fortune with respect to extreme weather, as compared to the past.
The lack of evidence to support claims of increasing frequency or intensity of hurricanes, floods, drought or tornadoes on climate timescales is also supported by the most recent assessments of the IPCC and the broader peer reviewed literature on which the IPCC is based.
I have included an update of relevant data and summary conclusions of the IPCC related to trends in extreme weather as an Appendix B to this testimony.…