To say that Congress is confused about climate change is laughable. As The Week reports, the House team of Mo Brooks and chair Lamar Smith is so lacking in basic scientific knowledge, that they used the lion share of a committee meeting to discuss global climate change to have Dr. Philip Duffy, the President (and applied physicist from Stanford with 20+ years of climate change research under his belt) of the Woods Hole Research Center explain to them why they were misinformed (video) about the results of climate change.
Some of the nuggets that The Week reported:
"1. NASA says that melting ice is a main cause of sea level rise. But Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) said Wednesday that the real culprit is erosion, namely from the White Cliffs of Dover as they collapse into the ocean.
2. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the committee chairman, shared slides showing that increased fossil fuel consumption doesn't correlate to rising sea levels — a view that Science noted "rejects thousands of scientific studies." Smith's data came from a single measurement station in San Francisco.
3. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) said that the committee should "be open to different points of view" — including whether humans are actually the main cause of global warming, as the committee has accused federal scientists of manipulating climate data before."
Climatewire has more on the Congressional open mouth/insert foot fest.
Sadly, Duffy had a lot of good ideas that he summarized in writing, though they likely fell on deaf ears::
Some of the nuggets that The Week reported:
"1. NASA says that melting ice is a main cause of sea level rise. But Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) said Wednesday that the real culprit is erosion, namely from the White Cliffs of Dover as they collapse into the ocean.
2. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the committee chairman, shared slides showing that increased fossil fuel consumption doesn't correlate to rising sea levels — a view that Science noted "rejects thousands of scientific studies." Smith's data came from a single measurement station in San Francisco.
3. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) said that the committee should "be open to different points of view" — including whether humans are actually the main cause of global warming, as the committee has accused federal scientists of manipulating climate data before."
Climatewire has more on the Congressional open mouth/insert foot fest.
Sadly, Duffy had a lot of good ideas that he summarized in writing, though they likely fell on deaf ears::
- "Accelerated deployment of carbon-free energy production technologies we have now, especially wind and solar;
- Development of new such technologies, as well as technologies for energy storage and transmission;
- Development of technologies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere;
- Research into geoengineering;
- Adoption of land-management practices that remove CO2 from the atmosphere;
- Development of improved technologies for measuring GHG emissions and global carbon stocks
- Accelerated research into understanding climate thresholds and tipping points, in order to inform top-line climate police goals (e.g. 2º vs 1.5º)"
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