Get Ready for More Congressional Doubt-Mongering on Climate

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In the current Congress, weโ€™ve already seen one example of an โ€œon the one hand, on the other handโ€ hearing about the science of climate change, courtesy of the House Energy and Commerceย Committee.

Now, get ready for another, courtesy of the House Science Committee.ย The broad strategy reflects what is sometimes called โ€œagnotologyโ€โ€”the strategic sowing of doubt aboutย science.

Letโ€™s run through the listed roster of those testifying at Thursdayโ€™s hearing:

1. Dr. J. Scott Armstrong,ย Professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. A recent Armstrong paper on global warming is here.ย The first sentence begins, โ€œWe summarize evidence showing that the global warming alarm movement has more of the character of a political movement than that of a scientificย controversyโ€ฆโ€ย 

2. Dr. Richard Muller,ย Professor, University of California, Berkley and Faculty Senior Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. While Muller has been criticized in the past for supporting climate skeptics, more recently his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Studyโ€”which initially drew criticism and raised alarmsโ€”apparently reconfirms the basic scientific consensus that global warming is happening and caused byย humans.

3. Dr. John Christy,ย Director, Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama in Huntsville. Christy is not a climate denier, or even a full-on โ€œskepticโ€ of human caused climate changeโ€”but he is known for calling into question how serious the problem is and whether it will be aย โ€œcatastrophe.โ€

4. Mr. Peter Glaser,ย Partner, Troutman Sanders, LLP. Glaser has previously testified that the Clean Air Act should be amended so that the EPA is fully blocked from using it to regulate greenhouse gasย emissions.

There will presumably be other witnesses as wellโ€“โ€œminorityโ€ witnesses called by the Democratic side that represent the mainstream scientific/IPCC viewโ€“but they arenโ€™t listedย yet.

What to make of this? On the one hand, and as Iโ€™veย noted previously, House Republicans are no longer behaving as though theyโ€™re 100 percent convinced that global warming is bunk. But it is only the barest of improvements for Congress to throw up its hands and construct a โ€œdebateโ€ over where the science liesโ€”performing the legislative equivalent of โ€œon the one hand, on the other handโ€ media coverage of globalย warming.

Actual press coverage of the upcoming hearing will surely do likewise. And citizens, weย now know, will respond to this approach by feeling defeated, deflated, uncertain where realityย lies.

This sort of thing has been going on in the US Congress for a long timeโ€”for over a decade. So in a sense, one more doubt-mongering hearing doesnโ€™t move the cultural confusion needleย much.

The real problem, for me, is that our cultureโ€™s outrage meter seems similarly calibrated. ย 

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