How climate ‘experts’ love to mock the ignorance of evil, anti-science Republicans!

E & E News had field day recently, deriding the stupidity apparently on display at a meeting of the U.S. House of Representatives Science, Space and Technology Committee.

Here is how it began its snarky put-down:

The Earth is not warming. The White Cliffs of Dover are tumbling into the sea and causing sea levels to rise. Global warming is helping grow the Antarctic ice sheet. Those are some of the skeptical assertions echoed by Republicans on the U.S. House of Representatives Science, Space and Technology Committee yesterday. The lawmakers at times embraced research that questions mainstream climate science during a hearing on how technology can be used to address global warming. A leading climate scientist testifying before the panel spent much of the two hours correcting misstatements.

The “leading climate scientist” in question was one Philip Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts and former senior adviser to the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

Sounds impressive. Except, as Paul Homewood notes, the idea that Duffy is a dispassionate observer is risible. Woods Hole Research Center is a green think tank, not a reputable scientific research establishment. And Duffy is more of a policy wonk than a practicing scientist.

Not that this would matter if he knew what he was talking about. If you’re going to put Republican congressmen right on their scientific ignorance, you need to do so with actual facts, right?

Paul Homewood has now exposed his three falsest claims for the #fakenews they are:

1) The rate of global sea-level rise has accelerated and is now four times faster than it was 100 years ago According to Jevrejeva’s study in 2014, based on 1277 tidal gauges: The new reconstruction suggests a linear trend of 1.9 ± 0.3 mm·yr− 1 during the 20th century, with 1.8 ± 0.5 mm·yr− 1 since 1970. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818113002750?via%3Dihub And this is their graph of global sea levels: Jevrejevaetal2013GPChange It is plainly evident that sea levels have been steadily rising since the mid 19thC, with a slight slow down between 1970 and 1990. The IPCC acknowledged the same thing in their AR5 Report in 2013.

and

2) We have satellite records clearly documenting a shrinkage of the Antarctic ice sheet and an acceleration of that shrinkage Again, this is a fake claim. According to a NASA study in 2015, the land ice is actually growing in Antarctica: A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers. The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice. According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses And the science is not even that controversial. Put simply, the warming of the climate since the Ice Age has led to increased snowfall over the Antarctic.

and

3) Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) said scientists said in the 1970s that the Earth was cooling, a popular talking point of climate skeptics and the subject of a fake Time magazine cover that has become a meme. Duffy corrected him and said that was essentially an outlier position at the time and that scientists long ago determined that humans were warming the planet This is the biggest BS of the lot. The cooling of the Earth’s climate between 1940 and the 1970s, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, was well known by climate scientists at the time. For instance, HH Lamb wrote this piece for the UNESCO’s Courier magazine in 1973:

You can read more details about just how embarrassingly Duffy got it wrong here at Homewood’s place.

It gives you an idea, doesn’t it, as to why there is such a growing divide between the mostly liberals pushing the climate change doom narrative and the mostly conservatives who think it’s a hoax?

That’ll be because the conservatives generally get their facts right while the liberals hide behind junk science mumbo jumbo, appeals to authority and sneery, and mocking articles like the one published by E & E.

Truth will win out in the end, of course. But the battle won’t be over for a long time yet.