This is your occasional update on All The Best People who are (sloooowwwwllllly) being brought forth to serve in this administration*. Thursday’s star is Kathleen Hartnett White, nominated to be the head of White House Council on Environmental Quality. KHW met the Senate on Wednesday and, as has now become customary in these situations, hilarity ensued.

It should not be any surprise that KHW has a long and well-documented history as a climate denier. But what became clear during her testimony is that her climate denial is firmly rooted in complete and utter ignorance of the science involved in studying the climate. For example, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island tried to talk to her about the effect of warming ocean water on the planet’s climate and how much of that rising heat is captured by the ocean. In response, and figuratively, of course, KHW reached under the table and repeatedly hit herself on the head with a rubber chicken.

Whitehouse: You think there’s serious scientific opinion that it’s below 50 percent?

KHW: (Loooooonnnnnnng silence) Yes.

Whitehouse: OK, wow. Do you think if the ocean warms, it expands? Does the law of thermal expansion apply to seawater?

KHW: Again, I do not have any kind of expertise or even much layman’s study of the ocean dynamics or the climate change issue.

Whitehouse: Just enough to know that you think there is not science that establishes clearly how much of the heat has been taken up by the ocean? You knew that, right? You said you knew that.

Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, had no better luck than Whitehouse in trying to get KHW to give some indication that she hadn’t been picked for this job through a blind lottery in a doughnut shop. From The Washington Post:

Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, asked Hartnett White some of the most detailed questions about climate change. He brought up dying coral reefs, and asked whether Hartnett White believed that was happening. “I would need to read some statement of that science,” she said. He brought up the loss of Arctic ice and permafrost. “I’m aware of the shrinking ice sheet in the Arctic, but the expanding ice sheet in the Antarctic,” Hartnett White replied.

Next week, staffing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by rock-paper-scissors.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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