As we wait for Scott “the public pays for me to wine and dine with industries I regulate” Pruitt to announce what exactly the Clean Power Plant replacement will be, the hardcore deniers continue to lobby for a repeal of the Endangerment Finding. And they continue to do so with reassuringly weak arguments.
Take Friday’s Town Hall op-ed by Dennis Avery of the Koch/Exxon/etc-funded Hudson Institute, in which he argues that judicial respect for the Endangerment finding means team Trump needs to overturn it. Among the various debunked denier talking points he uses (like CERN’s cloud experiment), Avery cites a WUWT post of Roy Spencer’s University of Alabama-Huntsville satellite data that claims “our planet’s temperature has risen an insignificant 0.02 degrees C since 1998.”
That WUWT post specifically says, right in the headline, that 2016 beat out 1998 as the warmest year in the satellite record. Yet Avery doesn’t seem to have read the headline of the post he cites: in the very next sentence, Avery calls that record-breaking heat the culmination of a “20-year non-warming” trend that disproves climate change.
It’s finally seeming to get to the point where even other deniers are starting to realize they can’t hide behind satellites anymore. In a new post on Monday, WUWT provides the latest data from Roy Spencer (the same sort of post that Avery cites) that shows last month was the warmest September in the satellite record.
This obvious contradiction between Spencer and WUWT’s admission of warming and Avery’s denial might make you think that “skeptics” would be hesitant to embrace Avery’s easily disproven argument, and be skeptical of something that even their own favorite voices contradict. Nope! The TownHall post was reposted on ICECAP, Heartland, CFACT and Canada Free Press, as well as to GWPF, which was then linked at Climate Depot. Climate skepticism in action, facts and clarity be damned!
At this rate, the only thing that looks to be in danger isn’t the Endangerment finding itself, but rather the denial of its validity. Pruitt may be a denier in public, but he’s not dumb. There’s no way an argument like Avery’s, debunked by its own sources, can stand up in court.
Not that Pruitt won’t find a way to appease his friends in the fossil fuel industry anyway.
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