Trump Loses Senate Vote To Repeal Obama-Era Methane Rule Thanks To McCain
Would have saved taxpayers $1.8 billion
Source: Trump Loses Senate Vote To Repeal Obama-Era Methane Rule Thanks To McCain…
3 Republicans Defect To Reject Bill To Repeal Obama-Era Methane Limits — Interior Dept. says it will scrap regs anyway
By Alexander C. Kaufman
Republicans’ bid to roll back an Obama-era rule limiting methane emissions from drilling rigs on public lands narrowly lost in the Senate on Wednesday after three GOP senators voted against the repeal.
In a 49-51 vote, the Senate preserved the rule, strengthened after last November’s election, that limited the amount of the powerful greenhouse gas methane that can be vented and burned from oil and gas extraction sites on federal lands.
Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) were expected to vote against the rule, but the surprise defection of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) helped tilt the scales on a vote environmentalists are hailing as a rare victory over President Donald Trump’s assault on policies that address climate change.
“Improving the control of methane emissions is an important public health and air quality issue, which is why some states are moving forward with their own regulations requiring greater investment in recapture technology,” McCain said in a statement. “While I am concerned that the BLM rule may be onerous, passage of the resolution would have prevented the federal government, under any administration, from issuing a rule that is ‘similar,’ according to the plain reading of the Congressional Review Act.”
Oops. Warmist Michael Mann destroys the case for action on climate change
“It is extremely likely (95 – 100% certain) that human activities caused more than half of the observed increase in global mean surface temperature from 1951 to 2010.”
— From the “Summary for Policy-Makers” of the IPCC’s AR5 Working Group I. Unfortunately, there is no consensus about the timing and magnitude of future warming.
House Committee on Science, Space & Technology.
On March 29 the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee held a hearing on “Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method“. The star witness, in terms of public profile, was Michael Mann — Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at Pennsylvania State. Mann gave a remarkable demonstration of why the 29 year-long climate change campaign has produced such small results. He opens strongly and closes with even more strongly. But his own evidence undercuts his claims.
(1) A consensus about current adverse impacts of climate change?
Mann opens with this claim, one that has been often said during the past several years.
“The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of the U.K., and all of the scientific societies of all of the industrial nations — the more than 30 scientific societies in the U.S. that have weighed in on the matter, and at least 97% of scientist publishing in the field have all concluded, based on the evidence, that that climate change is real, is human-caused, and is already having adverse impacts on us, our economy, and our planet.”
Yes, there is a consensus that climate change is real and largely human-caused. The third claims, about already causing adverse impacts, is quite false — as shown by the three footnotes Mann provides.
1. “Joint science academies’ statement: Global response to climate change” signed by representatives of 11 national science academies in 2005. It says that “Climate change is real.” No mention of current adverse impacts, just “changes in Earth’s climate.” Excerpt…
“However there is now strong evidence that significant global warming is
…Warmist Michael Mann Spends House Science Hearing Trashing Global Warming Skeptics
‘Remarkable’
Source: Climate Scientist Spends Hearing Trashing Global Warming Skeptics…
Analysis: ‘Michael Mann Embarrasses Himself before Congress’
by JULIE KELLY March 30, 2017 5:23 PM
If the climate-change evangelist can’t be bothered to take a House hearing seriously, why should anyone take him seriously? In his testimony to the House Science Committee on Wednesday, Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, told the story of Trofim Lysenko, a plant scientist who worked for Stalinist Russia: Lysenko was a Russian agronomist and it became Leninist doctrine to impose his views about heredity, which were crackpot theories, completely at odds with the world’s scientists. Under Stalin, scientists were being jailed if they disagreed with his theories about agriculture. And Russian agriculture actually suffered, scientists were jailed, many died in their jail cells and potentially millions of people suffered from the disastrous agriculture policies that followed from that. The gist of Mann’s anecdote was that scientists who challenge the ruling government’s diktat on any given scientific issue are demonized and punished while innocent bystanders suffer. In the here and now, this would seemingly apply to the minority of scientists brave enough to question the reigning dogma of climate science. After all, these are the folks who have been threatened by top law-enforcement officials, personally and professionally attacked by their peers, and even driven out of their academic positions due to the harassment. But astonishingly, Mann was not talking about those scientists: He was talking about himself. In his alternative universe, he and other climate scientists are the martyrs, oppressed and silenced by the Politburo. Never mind that Mann — a tenured professor at one of the country’s top public universities — opened his testimony by reciting a prodigious list of awards he has won, books he has authored, scientific organizations he leads. He is celebrated by the media and environmental groups around the world, and yet in front of Congress he talked like a guy on his way to the Gulag. It takes a special blend of hubris, juvenility, and dishonesty to portray yourself as a victim when you are really the bully.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446295/michael-mann-house-testimony-climate-change-embarrassing-rude…
Michael Mann Vs the Truth at Congressional Climate Hearing – Caught in Multiple Provable Falsehoods
31 Mar 201751
Apart from being a tetchy, hotheaded, rude, bullying, cackhanded, ignorant, malevolent and embarrassingly useless excuse for a scientist, Professor Michael Mann – the guy behind the serially-discredited Hockey Stick – is also the most outrageous liar.
Mann used often to claim that he was a Nobel Prizewinner – till someone unhelpfully pointed out that he was but one of hundreds of scientists who contributed to Assessment Reports by the IPCC (which did win the Nobel Prize in 2007)
This week the bald-pated shyster was up to his old tricks again, telling a string of porkie pies at a climate science hearing of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
Given how litigious the mendacious, bloviating poltroon can be – he’s currently engaged in at least two defamation suits: one against Tim Ball, the other against Mark Steyn – I obviously have to tread very carefully here.
So I’d just like to say, as delicately and politely as I can to the Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State University:
“Liar, liar. Your pants on fire.”
Here’s the evidence:
Porkie Number One
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.
Porkie Number Two
Mann denied having called his fellow climate scientist and special witness, former Georgia Tech Judith Curry, a “denier”.
“A number of statements have been attributed to me. I don’t believe I’ve called anybody a denier,” he solemnly told the hearing.
To which Judith Curry, sitting next to him, replied: “It’s in your written testimony. Go read it again.”
You can watch the moment where Curry smacks him down below:
Mann then proceeded indignantly to quibble that though he might have called Curry a “climate science denier” he hadn’t called her a “climate change denier”. [As if there’s any meaningful distinction between the two slurs]. But this claim – as Stephen McIntyre notes – was also a lie.
confronted with written evidence that he called Curry “climate science denier”, Mann said he hadnt called her “climate CHANGE denier”. #FAKE
Congressman and Michael Mann battle over ‘Stalinist tactics’ in ‘global warming’ debate
…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 …
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 …