Back in July when Buzzfeed’s Zahra Hirji reported that Lamar Smith went on a trip to the Arctic, some folks optimistically hoped this would portend a change in his steadfast anti-climate position. After all, a similar trip made Republican Bob Inglis reverse course on climate denial, so perhaps seeing the real-world, real-time impacts of climate change would similarly open Smith’s eyes. Maybe the chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology committee would once again be the sort of person who embraced, instead of attacked, science.
Nope! In his second story in a series filed from Alaska for E&E this week, Scott Waldman checks in with some of the people Smith actually talked to on his trip, and gets some perspective about Smith’s position on climate science. According to Smith’s emailed response to Waldman, "the pace and permanence of current climate variations, as well as the causes, still aren't fully understood," and that more research into climate change is necessary.
Smith sure has a weird way of showing that position. Yesterday, the Daily Caller published a glorified Letter to the Editor from Smith, praising Michael Bastasch’s attacking coverage of a recent Kerry Emmanuel paper. Emmanuel’s paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found warming temperatures increased the probability of Harvey-level rainfall amounts in Texas. Bastasch, however, attacked the study and the media that (accurately) reported on it by implying media made the direct causation argument that warming made Harvey. But in reality, and even according to the headlines Bastasch quotes, media largely covered the study accurately by talking about the probability that warming made Harvey more likely.
So it doesn’t look like Smith is done antagonizing climate science in prestigious journals via Very Respectable News Outlets. Despite seeing the melting permafrost firsthand and hearing from impacted Americans in the Arctic, it seems Smith remains resolute in denial, even as he says he supports more research.
We don’t expect Smith to actually read or accept any of that research, however--and we’d bet it’s only a matter of time before he attacks the latest pause-busting paper. In a new study published in Nature Climate Change this week, researchers found that when you account for the rapidly melting Arctic, there never was a hiatus. Imagine that!
And it would be interesting to see what Smith has to say about the recent study in Nature Scientific Reports showing that we do actually know that human activity is causing warming. The study proposes “a simple real-time index of global human-induced warming and assess its robustness to uncertainties in climate forcing and short-term climate fluctuations.”
Hear that Smith? Scientists have answered your questions about human influence on the “pace and permanence of current climate variations”! The researchers even made a handy dandy website at GlobalWarmingIndex.org that lets you see just what temperatures would be with only natural cycles.
Now there’s no excuse to claim we don’t know the extent to which human activity is responsible for climate change.
Well, except that whole campaign contributions thing.
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