OLD PARTISAN ARGUMENTS OVER CLIMATE CHANGE RESURFACE AT HEARING

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
08/03/12

Deep divisions on the existence of climate change, its effects and possible mitigation options were on display this week as the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee attempted to wade back into the issue for the first time in three years. Debates fell along familiar partisan lines as senators heard from two witnesses who previously conducted work for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a skeptic climatologist about the latest climate change science at a hearing this week. Committee members commented on how the panel’s debates, which were heated at times, reminded them of the last time the committee examined the issue in 2009. “This seems like the good ol’ days. We used to have these hearings all the time,” quipped the committee’s Ranking Member Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), one of the Senate’s most vocal climate skeptics. Democrats said they were surprised that the issue is still up for debate in the U.S. Congress. “I find it quite incredible that we’re still raising questions about whether global warming is a real problem,” said Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.).

Democrats lamented that when the committee last visited the issue, carbon legislation seemed all-but-certain. At the time, Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) helped shepherd cap-and-trade legislation through the panel despite sparse Republican support. However, the measure, which narrowly passed the then-Democrat-controlled House in 2009, fell a handful of votes shy of passage in the Senate and quickly sank thereafter in late 2010. The notion of carbon pricing schemes have appeared all but dead on arrival in Congress ever since, despite a recent resurfacing of the carbon tax debate in earnest over recent weeks.

Democrats Link Extreme Weather Events to Climate Change

Senators from both parties indicated an acceptance of the fact that Congress will likely not take up climate legislation soon. However, Boxer said it is dangerous for policymakers to deny that climate change is not occurring. “Climate change is real, human activities are the primary cause and the warming of the planet poses a significant risk to people and the environment. I believe to declare otherwise is putting the American people in direct danger,” she said. “The body of evidence is overwhelming, the world’s leading scientists agree and predictions of climate change impacts are coming true before our eyes.” Boxer and other Democrats on the committee linked the drought currently plaguing a large swath of the country, the recent wildfires in Colorado and large-scale iceberg melting in Greenland as evidence of climate change ramping up. “We can’t turn away from the mountain of evidence that climate change has already started to impact the planet and will only grow worse without action,” Boxer said.

The few Republicans in attendance, however, criticized committee Democrats for the timing of the hearing. “A lot of people believe that today’s hearing is an effort to capitalize on the recent weather events of the summer in an attempt to reignite the global warming hysteria,” said Inhofe, who pointed to a picture of his grandchildren playing in multiple feet of snow in Washington, D.C., several years ago following a notable blizzard. John Christy, a climatologist from the University of Alabama-Huntsville, said that some of the links between extreme weather events and climate change are “overstated.” “These headlines [on recent extreme weather events] are not based on climate science. It is scientifically more accurate to say that this is what Mother Nature looks like, because events even worse than [what] we have seen here have happened in the past with greenhouse gases increasing like they are today,” he said. “It gives some people great comfort to offer a quick and easy answer when weather strays from the average rather than struggle with what the real truth is, which is we don’t know enough about the climate to even predict things like this.”

Republicans Question Scientific Consensus on Global Warming

Republicans questioned the scientific consensus on global warming—which the National Academy of Sciences believes to be roughly 97 to 98 percent of those publishing in the field. Inhofe said he thinks that the science is not settled. “I disagree when you say 1 or 2 percent [of scientists do not believe in global warming]…the science is clearly divided out in the real world,” Inhofe said. He questioned the credibility of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, bringing up the so-called “Climategate” scandal where hackers stole e-mails from climate scientists and publicized what many skeptics said was a conspiracy to create and exaggerate the existence of global warming. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) added that data from the last decade has helped validate Inhofe’s skepticism and “demonstrated the incorrectness of the modeling that the global warming alarmists have put [forward].”

Democrats and other witnesses, however, quickly fired back. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called Inhofe’s positions “extreme” and “dead wrong.” “I certainly agree with approximately 98 percent of active publishing climate scientists that global warming is real and significantly driven by human activity,” he said. Lautenberg underscored the need for scientific evidence in the field. “We need to get our science from scientists and not politicians or industry lobbyists, and the scientists at NASA, the National Academy of Sciences and every other leading scientific body have made it clear that global climate change poses a deep and very serious threat to humanity,” he said. 

Christopher Field, director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institute for Science who also works for the IPCC, said that the scientific community’s consensus on climate change is “unequivocal.” “We’re trying to provide sufficient information for policymakers to make good decisions to try and figure out ways to avoid the damages that come from climate change without providing unacceptable costs to society,” he said in his testimony. “We’re trying to find smart ways to move forward, recognizing what’s happening, what the risks are and that there are consequences to using the atmosphere as a dump for greenhouse gases as the same way are consequences to making changes to the economy.” He later added: “The scientific community is as close to united on this than it [has been] on anything else.”