Congress to slash funding for Global Warming research at NASA

You might find this interesting, informative, and/or entertaining:

House Science Committee Hearing

Full Committee Hearing- Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method
Date:
Wednesday, March 29, 2017 - 10:00am
Location:
2318 Rayburn House Office Building

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ok what is
World Net Daily?

 

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What is a "global warming related program"?

It's not an unproven scientific claim, it's an incoming environmental threat. The government is supposed to deal with things like that - that's one of its central functions. Flood control. Irrigation. Storm and earthquake and tsunami recovery. Famine and disease. Grazing land allocation in times of drought. These kinds of things are basic governmental responsibilities.

And the expenditure does not mutually exclude teachers, it mutually excludes military hardware. Much less of a loss - especially given the military gains of being well prepared for global warming.

Dozens of graphs you've seen, some of which you've posted, have been provided for you on this forum.

Not mindless, at all. Technical details are normally best left to experts, and since here the basic situation we are discussing is not affected by whatever they find we can safely do that.

 

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It's been entertaining in the past - and kind of informative, if what you are interested in is just how incompetent the Republican Party - in control of the House Committee On Science, Space, and Technology - has become, at dealing with physical reality:


Only Rohrabacher remains from that particular video compilation of mental dustbunnies and Republican thinking, but he is far from the only holdover on the committee - including its chairman and his agenda from the beginning: http://www.nature.com/news/how-republicans-reshaped-the-house-science-committee-1.20829
And the new guys look like more of the same:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/house-science-panel-adds-climate-denying-members/

 

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Maybe not. I googled "Federal agencies plan to spend $27 billion on global warming-related programs in 2017" and that was the only link.

 

ok goat
I had not seen that.

meanwhile, here's the link for those who would like to watch/listen

http://democrats.science.house.gov/...ns-policy-implications-and-scientific-method#

 

Four "witnesses" and two of them (Curry and Christy) deny CO2 boost effects, while a third (Pielke) instead denies the projections of economic and infrastructure harm from the boost effects.

Curry's general approach, which generally includes errors of thinking (check out her take on the famous emails, say, or her weird use of "magnifying effects" around min 56) and attributions of bad motive and personal misbehavior to others, I am familiar with - the other two I met for the first time in this video. So all I know about Pielke is from watching him mislead and attack persons in this hearing - his strawman on hurricane frequency around the hour mark, for example - but getting fired from 538.com is a bad sign, imho. Christy, who cares - although around 1:19 his sideslip of the criticism of his basic reasoning (by Mann, pointing to his misinterpretation of sensitivity dependence on lapse rates) to focus on an arcane technical matter of satellite data interpretation (whether or not his satellite data was blurred by marginal stratosphere readings) did not recommend his veracity in general.

The Chairman, Lamar Smith, is a genuine wingnut, a Texan oil and gas industry supported Republican Party opponent of science in general, and climate effects of CO2 boosting in particular. His opening speech is pure political bs, and a serious threat - he's powerful. And his willingness to abuse his power is visible in the loaded questions and manipulative approach.

He's a Christian Scientist by faith, a Yale alumnus and Southern Methodist JD by education, and an excellent illustration of Gore Vidal's famous observation: that one of the scariest movies imaginable would be "C Students From Yale" (he was speaking of W, Kerry, et al).

This kangaroo hearing was political theater, and otherwise a complete waste of time, unless one's goal is to pick up clues to what this Republican government is going to fuck up next.

But anyway:
Funny thing happens around 1:22 - Judith Curry calls for a lot more basic research into climate. (She repeats that later). We don't have enough, she says. Not sure that Smith is on board with that.
Another around 1:28: the chairman, Lamar Smith, declares that Science Magazine is not an "objective source".
A bit later we have one of the wingnuts demanding that Mann produce "documentation of {his} lack of association" with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Documentation?
Around 1:40 one of the distinguished Congressmen questions Mann - apparently sincerely - as to how come the error ranges of temperature estimates are so much smaller for recent years than in the distant past. Mann explains about thermometers.
Smith, Rohrbacher, and Weber take time to complain about Mann casting aspersions and not being forthright about his lack of "associations" - seriously: they feel dissed, and they take time to whine and pout. These are grown men?
From about 1:45 on Weber is questioning the scientists on bureaucratic attributes of governmental policy and regulation of industry. Pielke commits blasphemy.
Around 1:56 + Congressman Webster has Curry describe the standard explanation of what caused the ice ages, which she sort of screws up (she doesn't explain things very well), and then Webster proves that we don't know everything and natural causes happened and there might be an ice age coming. Plus there weren't any people around.
So Curry then takes over, and says "ocean oscillations" and "natural variables", and that there wasn't much "human impact" before 1940.
So Webster concludes that because we didn't know stuff, we still don't, and there's an ebb and flow.

And then hey, some Congresscritter named "Mr Beyer" asks an intelligent question based on the data presented by both Christy and Mann! Cool. First good question of the entire hearing, iirc. Starts around 2:03 +, takes a bit, good stuff from 2:04:30. This guy - I looked him up, startled, turns out he's a Dem - https://www.congress.gov/member/donald-beyer/B001292

And another one! a Congressman Foster, asking for consensus witness panel opinions on the basic situation quite reasonably, and getting a couple. Starts around 2:15:30. Turns out he's a PhD physicist, an actual scientist - and another Dem, of course. Trend?

Curry delivers the following: The rate of ocean acidification is slow, and we don't know anything about its effects. And climate has always been changing, naturally. The standard wingnut line.

The final few minutes taken up by an attempt to make witness support for continued funding the takeaway - a Ms Estey providing the rhetoric, which wasn't half bad. Another Dem.

 

Where? I think you're just lying again.

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So since you're willfully ignorant of the details, you can make assertions you can't support?

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In a way, it's kind of sad when a sociopath like Mann doesn't seem to know when he is lying anymore.
The chairman, Lamar Smith, even called him out on one of his lies, and Mann still didn't seem to have any clear understanding that he had lied.
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Here is a rather unflattering view of Mann's performance:
Apart from being a tetchy, hotheaded, rude, bullying, cackhanded, ignorant, malevolent and embarrassingly useless excuse for a scientist, Professor Michael Mann – the guy behind the serially-discredited Hockey Stick – is also the most outrageous liar.
Mann used often to claim that he was a Nobel Prizewinner – till someone unhelpfully pointed out that he was but one of hundreds of scientists who contributed to Assessment Reports by the IPCC (which did win the Nobel Prize in 2007)

This week the bald-pated shyster was up to his old tricks again, telling a string of porkie pies at a climate science hearing of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

Given how litigious the mendacious, bloviating poltroon can be – he’s currently engaged in at least two defamation suits: one against Tim Ball, the other against Mark Steyn – I obviously have to tread very carefully here.

So I’d just like to say, as delicately and politely as I can to the Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State University:

“Liar, liar. Your pants on fire.”


Here’s the evidence:

see more at:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-govern...s-the-truth-at-congressional-climate-hearing/

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and:
Rather than present data or debate the science, Mann mostly engaged in the sophistry that has gradually undermined the credibility of climate science. He repeatedly referred to a bogus “97 percent consensus” about man-made climate change, and accused the Heartland Institute of being a “climate-change denying, Koch brothers–funded outlet.” He engaged in one ad hominem attack after another against his fellow panelists and the committee’s chairman, Representative Lamar Smith. He questioned whether Smith really understood the scientific method and read a nasty quote about Smith from a smear piece in Science magazine

from:
http://www.nationalreview.com/artic...se-testimony-climate-change-embarrassing-rude
.........
see more at:
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2017/04/02/michael-mann-makes-the-case-for-climate-action/
............

This view ain't nothing new.
See:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/michael-mann-is-a-liar-and-a-cheat-heres-why.php

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By turning the hearing into partisan posturing, dog and pony show, have the Mann supporters shot themselves in the foot?

 

When deniers have no facts to support their case, and when each year of increasing temperatures proves them wrong again, I guess personal insults is all they have left.

If Mann was a woman she would already have been called a whore.

 

billvon:
You seem to like and respect Michael Mann.
True?
Why?

 

I don't have any more or less respect for Mann than most other scientists. I've never met him and have only read his work. He is just one of many working on climate change.

 

And still,
You would defend his actions in the hearings?

 

That's because he hadn't lied. Lamar Smith lied, Judith Curry was typically vague and confused, and you bought it.

Lamar Smith was cleverly wrong about what Mann said, making a key change in wording, and so well organized in his error as to prove deliberate deception.
Mann did not lie, Smith did. Curry covered her ass better, by merely adopting the victim pose so common among the wingnut crowd, but Smith flat out lied.

And your main source, by which you were deceived about that hearing (willingly, you are cooperating in your deception), was Breitbart. That is not a joke - you used Breitbart as a source for labeling somebody else a liar.

While watching a kangaroo hearing run by the current chairman - Chairman, guy in charge - of the House Committee on Science and Technology, who is - don't forget - a Christian Scientist. Not as a child, not in the past, right now: a faithful and believing adherent of the tenets of the Christian Science Church . Because that's the kind of government we have now, thanks to the core Republican vote.

You guys have a serious thinking disorder.

 

It's called accuracy, not sophistry.

As establishing the current state of scientific opinion, which it does.

Which is accurate.

1) That isn't true 2) and it wouldn't make him wrong.

He doesn't.
And that was after - a while after - Smith himself had spent a lot of time arguing from his opinion on the scientific method, and reading his understanding of science and the scientific method into the record, and using his power as Chairman to highlight it, thereby himself making his intellectual inadequacy a central issue in the hearing.
Did I mention that Smith is a believing Christian Scientist?

That was not a nasty smear piece, it was part of a polite and civilized evaluation of the propriety of having whom Science was tippytoe careful not to describe as an ignorant and corrupt Texas fossil fuel industry shill and fringe religion adherent in effective control of the budgetary arm of the US government's science funding.

Smith's response was to declare Science magazine to be "not an objective source". Source of what, he didn't say. Neither did he list sources he would accept as more objective - he's not that stupid.

 

You should have mentioned CS believes medical problems can be cured by prayer...I looked them up just now. Shouldn't folk like that be declared nutters.
To put the 27 billion in some sort of context I understand USA spends 100 billion pa to develope new weapons.
Alex

 

Will I defend all his actions? No.
Want to ask about specific actions?

 

Lamar Smith is a political hack who doesn't give a crap about science. His goal is to actively undermine facts and hand the EPA over to corporate polluters. He has zero credibility with me or anyone who cares about the truth. And he's a racist piece of shit (of course).