US Sci Tech Committee hearing on IPCC

Posted: May 29, 2014 by tallbloke in solar system dynamics

The IPCC Report

The US Committee on Science, Space and Technology held a 2-hour hearing Examining the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Process today.

The aim was to evaluate the processes behind IPCC AR5.

The witnesses were Richard Tol, Michael Oppenheimer, Daniel Botkin, Roger Pielke Sr. The link above includes the opening statements of the witnesses.

Donna Laframboise has a blog post where she says “Experts condemn the IPCC”.

The views of Tol and Pielke are probably fairly familiar to most. Botkin’s comments were particularly interesting. He said that species are resilient and adaptable and that scares of extinctions have been greatly exaggerated. He also said that focus on global warming had distracted attention from other more serious environmental problems. It was left to Oppenheimer to defend the IPCC orthodoxy.

There was a live feed of the session, but it was rather patchy. There are some videos:

Video 1 (wind forward to 15:40 where it…

View original post 35 more words

Comments
  1. Andrew says:
    May 29, 2014 at 7:43 pm

    Statement by the committee chairman http://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/HHRG-113-%20SY-WState-S000244-20140529.pdf

  2. michael hart says:
    May 29, 2014 at 8:32 pm

    What I find encouraging is that there are clearly sensible people in positions of influence. people who invite the Richard Tols and Roger Pielkes to speak, despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth that emanates from the “the debate is over” side.

  3. tchannon says:
    May 29, 2014 at 9:17 pm

    Donna Laframboise has hard words to say about the matter

    Experts Condemn the IPCC at US Hearing

  4. michael hart says:
    May 30, 2014 at 2:23 am

    I liked this quote from Richard Tol:

    “A report that is rare should make a big splash – and an ambitious team wants to make a bigger splash than last time. It’s worse than we thought. We’re all gonna die an even more horrible death than we thought six years ago.”

  5. Paul Vaughan says:
    May 30, 2014 at 5:35 am

    “Botkin’s comments were particularly interesting.”

    If that’s who I think it is, he wrote 2 of my undergrad textbooks:
    • Intro Botany
    • Plant Ecology

    “He also said that focus on global warming had distracted attention from other more serious environmental problems.”

    This saliently & sensibly reads like machine-gunned bullet holes of sober, sacred truth riddled through dark tabloid puppetry, propaganda & stealth deception.

  6. Gail Combs says:
    June 11, 2014 at 2:24 am

    Michael Oppenheimer’s Bio via the American Chemical Society is interesting. (I was a member before they turned to “Advocacy >> Science Information For Policymakers >> Congressional Briefings >> Climate Change: Bringing together Science, Policy & Business” )

    Notice that Oppenheimer is listed under the broad heading of ADVOCACY

    ….Prior to joining the Princeton faculty, Dr. Oppenheimer spent more than two decades at Environmental Defense, where he was chief scientist and manager of the Climate and Air Program, and before that he was an atomic and molecular astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He serves on the National Academy of Sciences’ Panel on Alternative Liquid Transportation Fuels and as a science advisor to the Environmental Defense Fund, and was a co-founder of the Climate Action Network. He has a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the University of Chicago and an S.B. in Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
    http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/policy/acsonthehill/briefings/climatechange/oppenheimer-biography.html

    For our European friends. The University of Chicago is “owned’ by the Rockefellers who want an international government. The University of Chicago was founded in 1890 by the American Baptist Education Society and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller the current David Rockefeller’s father.

    I wonder if the Baptist Education Society was aware of the actual goals.

    Dumbing Down America
    by Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld

    I am often asked to name those educators responsible for the change in primary reading instruction which has led to the decline of literacy in America. People ask this because by the time they understand the history of the reading problem and of the dumbing down process that has been going on in our public schools for the past forty years, they recognize that all of this is not the result of a series of accidents but of conscious, deliberate decisions made by our educational leaders….

    …. In 1894, Dewey was appointed head of the department of philosophy, psychology and education at the University of Chicago which had been established two years earlier by a gift from John D. Rockefeller. In 1896, Dewey created his famous experimental Laboratory School where he could test the effects of the new psychology on real live children.

    Dewey’s philosophy had evolved from Hegelian idealism to socialist materialism, and the purpose of the school was to show how education could be changed to produce little socialists and collectivists instead of little capitalists and individualists. It was expected that these little socialists, when they became voting adults, would dutifully change the American economic system into a socialist one.

    In order to do so he analyzed the traditional curriculum that sustained the capitalist, individualistic system and found what he believed was the sustaining linchpin — that is, the key element that held the entire system together: high literacy. To Dewey, the greatest obstacle to socialism was the private mind that seeks knowledge in order to exercise its own private judgment and intellectual authority. High literacy gave the individual the means to seek knowledge independently. It gave individuals the means to stand on their own two feet and think for themselves. This was detrimental to the “social spirit” needed to bring about a collectivist society….