Tom Williams via Getty Images Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) is the new chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

A congressional committee that for years served as a platform for one of Washington’s most stalwart climate change deniers to peddle his own anti-science views held a hearing Wednesday to discuss the urgent threat of climate change. “It is clear that we are responsible for our planet warming at an alarming rate,” Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), the new chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, said in her opening statement announcing the first of many such hearings. ”And we’re already feeling the impact of this warming today.” Johnson takes over the chair from now-retired Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the 14th-longest-serving member of the U.S. House, who led the committee for the last six years. The San Antonio native left behind a long history of harassing federal climate scientists, dismissing the threat of climate change and stacking hearings with industry lobbyists and like-minded skeptics. He promoted a fake scandal about climate scientists manipulating data, subpoenaed those who investigated oil giant Exxon Mobil’s suppression of climate change research and, toward the end of his tenure, went as far as to claim that pumping Earth’s atmosphere full of carbon dioxide is “beneficial” to crop production and overall planetary lushness. In a December editorial in the Austin American-Statesman, Smith appeared to defend himself against negative media coverage of his tenure: “Headlines claiming that Congress is making a ‘return to science’ are ignoring years of progress on policies advancing research, STEM education, and space exploration,” he wrote.

Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the 14th-longest-serving member of the U.S. House, retired in January.

But for anyone who has followed the committee over the last several years, Wednesday was ― aside from a few moments ― a clear return to science. The event was “the most serious & most constructive congressional hearing I’ve seen in a decade (at least),” Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said on Twitter.

W/o question, today's @HouseScience hearing on climate science (& impacts/responses) w/@bobkopp Natalie Mahowald, Jennifer Francis, @JosephMajkut & Kristie Ebi, was the most serious & most constructive congressional hearing I've seen in a decade (at least).



It can be done! — Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) February 13, 2019

Not a single skeptic of climate science testified ― a grand departure from Smith’s time as chair. The committee’s Republican minority invited Joseph Majkut, an atmospheric scientist and director of climate policy at the libertarian-leaning Niskanen Center, as its witness. “Climate change is real and global emissions of greenhouse gases are driving latter day global warming,” Majkut said “As climate change continues, more severe and perverse effects will manifest themselves, causing economic harms and damages to individuals, ecosystems and other things that we tend to be concerned about.” The discussion largely focused on a pair of sobering recent climate assessments. In October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, published a report warning world governments that they must cut global emissions in half over the next 12 years to avoid catastrophic warming that would bring $54 trillion in damages. The following month, the federal government’s National Climate Assessment concluded that without drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, warming in the United States “could increase by 9°F (5°C) or more by the end of this century.” The Earth “is running a fever” that is already driving heat waves, extreme rainfall events and coastal flooding, Dr. Robert Kopp, director of Rutgers University’s Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and a lead author of the National Climate Assessment, told the panel. “To stabilize the global climate, net global carbon dioxide emissions must be brought to zero,” Kopp said. “The faster we reduce our emissions, the less severe the effects and the lower the risk of unwelcome surprises.” In 2017, more than a dozen major climate- and weather-related disasters in the U.S. caused a record $306.2 billion in damages and killed more than 300 people. Last year’s hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters caused an additional $91 billion in damages, according to an annual federal analysis.

ASSOCIATED PRESS In this Dec. 5, 2017 file photo, smoke rises behind a destroyed apartment complex as a the Thomas wildfire burns in Ventura, Calif.