A Russian loomed over the House of Representatives Wednesday. And it wasn’t Putin. Instead, the figure who came up in two different discussions among House members was Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist who manipulated data in ways that fit perfectly with the political agenda of Joseph Stalin. Lysenko’s theories, which rejected the now accepted ideas of genes and genetic inheritance, were so appealing to the Soviet dictator they became the only ones taught in the country in the 1940s as Soviet scientists were forbidden from contradicting his teachings. Yet the actual research behind Lysenko’s conclusions was so off base that the decision to exempt him from the standard scientific process ultimately helped lead to a famine.

The story of the man who imperiled his country with pseudoscience designed to please a politician seemed particularly relevant during a day filled with Republican efforts to provide scientific cover for a range of unscientific policies. The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology began the day with a hearing called Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method. Held just two days after a Trump executive order killed federal efforts to address climate change, the hearing included testimony from three experts far out of the scientific mainstream whose careers have been boosted by promoting theories that benefit Republicans and the fossil fuel industry.

Expert witnesses Judith Curry, John Christy, and Roger Pielke Jr., who are frequently called on to present the Republican case for inaction on climate in Congress, all underscored the point that whatever is happening with the climate has been exaggerated and doesn’t warrant serious action, a message that may be particularly welcome to administration officials who have already decided to take just that path.

Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama who insists that extreme weather events are not related to climate change, asserted that while the earth may be warming, it’s not due to human activity. “Mother nature can cause such temperature changes on her own,” he said. Pielke, a science policy writer at the University of Colorado, said that he believes in climate change and suggested that a carbon tax might be a good idea, but stuck by his idea that there is no evidence to suggest that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, or droughts are increasing. And Judith Curry, a former professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, insisted that humans might be responsible for less than 50 percent of climate change, a possibility that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has given a less than one in 10,000 chance of being true.

The focus on the convenient untruths of Curry, Pielke, and Christy was an after-the-fact attempt to justify the about-face by turning scientific reality on its head. Although 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate warming trends are “extremely likely due to human activity,” only one of four witnesses represented that point of view.

Michael Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, pointed to a study he published earlier this week linking climate change to droughts, heat waves, and floods, and noted that the fires that recently devastated the Midwest are evidence of the need to respond to the phenomenon. Mann has been widely attacked for such mainstream views before. His email has been hacked. He’s received hate mail, death threats, and has been the subject of hostile congressional hearings. At Wednesday’s hearing, he invoked Lysenko to explain the current enthusiasm for climate denial and then withstood condemnation from Republicans who chastised him for referring to the other panelists as deniers. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher told him he should be “ashamed.”

In the upside-down world of the House science committee, Mann is the aggressor and those who have attacked his widely supported views are the aggrieved ones. “As a result of my analyses, I have been called a serial climate disinformer,” said Curry. “There is enormous pressure for climate scientists to confirm to the so-called consensus.”