On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the White House will create an ad hoc committee of federal scientists to reconsider the conclusions of the National Climate Assessment (NCA) released last November. That report, written mainly by Obama-era holdovers, concluded that “it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid twentieth century.”
The Post famously claimed last year that President Trump was “complicit” in the landfall of Hurricane Florence last year, so their objectivity on the subject can be called into question.
When questioned about the NCA last year, President Trump was dismissive of the report’s conclusions. “Yeah, I don’t believe it,” Trump said. “I’ve seen it, I’ve read some of it, and it’s fine.”
The panel would exist under the auspices of the National Security Council (NSC), which is the president’s principal forum for consideration of national security, military, and foreign-policy matters. The new committee would include scientists who are skeptical of the so-called scientific consensus on climate change, which posits that the Earth is warming, and that human emissions of carbon dioxide is the most significant cause of that warming.
Critics challenge that any committee convened by the NSC wouldn’t be as transparent as it should be.
Among those supposedly on the short list of committee members is Dr. William Happer, a physics professor emeritus at Princeton University. He is a high-profile skeptic of the idea that carbon dioxide is causing global warming and the idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. Happer is also a current member of the NSC.
In 2016, Happer stated, “I believe that more CO2 is good for the world, that the world has been in a CO2 famine for many tens of millions of years and that one or two thousand ppm [parts per million] would be ideal for the biosphere.”
In 2017, Happer told The Scientist magazine that climate-change research had become a “cult movement.”
Climate alarmists have gone predictably insane over the very mention of a committee that might come to a different conclusion from their own.
“This is like assembling a panel of gravity skeptics who insist it’s safe to jump off tall buildings, except in this case they want to take us all with them,” NASA climate scientist Kate Marvel told Axios.
“This is a truly bad idea that just refuses to die,” retired U.S. Navy oceanographer David Titley said. “All bureaucracies have them — they are just more dangerous when they originate and live in the White House.”
Tony Schwartz, the CEO of climate hysteric organization the Energy Project, tweeted, “Trump and White House searching for fourth rate scientists who are willing to deny the reality of climate change. As bad as Trump is in countless ways, this purposeful blindness to the most important global crisis we face is worse than anything else he’s done.”
Leftist politicians have expressed similar outrage. Representative Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said that the new panel was a manifestation of Trump’s “rejection of reality” and warned it could disrupt national security planning around the world.
“At every turn here they have tried to basically bury the science behind climate change,” Smith said. “It is simply not debatable from a scientific standpoint. Climate change will lead to instability in parts of the world that are fairly predictable.”
Since all these scientists (and left-wing politicians) believe that their conclusions with respect to climate change are so unassailable that their theory is on a level to that of the theory of gravity, why are they so afraid of one ad hoc committee, which may or may not challenge their belief? If science is truly a search for objective truth, there should be thousands of such groups looking at climate change from a skeptical point of view. After all, any scientific theory needs to be falsifiable. A theory necessarily needs to be researched from both ends of the spectrum to be considered plausible.
The answer, of course, is because climate science is sufficiently polluted by the politics of world socialism and globalism that it can barely be called science anymore. The anger in the comments of Marvel, Titley, and Schwartz isn’t in the reasoned tone of scientists faced with an alternative theory. It’s more akin to the fury of a religious person whose dogma is challenged.
