These were the themes on display Wednesday during the fiery Senate confirmation hearing for Environmental Protection Agency administrator nominee Scott Pruitt. Senators questioned him intensely on his doubts about climate change and his long history of filing lawsuits against the very agency he has been nominated by President-elect Trump to lead.
Given Pruitt’s combative history toward the agency — and Trump’s promises to promote nearly unfettered fossil fuel development while wiping away regulations controlling carbon emissions — a Pruitt-led EPA could undo or weaken the Obama administration’s climate regulations that gave weight to the U.S. commitment to curb greenhouse gas pollution under the Paris Climate Agreement. And that could undermine global progress on climate change and help obscure the threat Americans face from global warming.
In an early exchange that set the tone for Democrats’ sharp criticism of his record, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., chastised Pruitt for not recognizing how rising seas caused by climate change are harming Rhode Island’s seafood industry, which is harming fisheries off the state’s coast.
“I see nothing in your career that you will give those fishermen any confidence that you care for their wellbeing one bit,” Whitehouse said.
Like Interior Secretary nominee Ryan Zinke before him on Tuesday, Pruitt said anger among those unhappy with the federal government demands sweeping change in how it enforces regulations.
Those talking points are becoming common among Trump administration nominees who insist that Obama-era regulations have stifled economic progress, hurt jobs and need to be drastically changed, even as the economy has continued to grow and unemployment has returned to the low levels of 2008 prior to the Great Recession and Obama’s presidency.
Read more at Pruitt Dances on Climate, Calls for Change at EPA
No intelligent person denies climate change. The new EPA chief is taking flack for rightfully questioning the climate change alarmists blaming man while they ignore and deny the most powerful naturally occurring climate forcing event... the 100,000 year glacial cycle. How can they call themselves scientists when they ignore over 1 million years of science?
ReplyDeleteI realize they are unable to do it, but global warming scientists need to put at least SOME effort into deciphering the math that would comprehend the reactions of the 100,000 year glacial cycle that seems to be mitigating the introduction of man caused greenhouse gasses.
Science needs to stop ignoring this the most powerful naturally occurring climate forcing event. Science predicts the effect of the greenhouse gasses on the average earth temperature while ignoring, necessarily, how the complex 100,000 year glacial cycle will react.
There is obviously something that is causing the climate change predictions to fail. Based primarily upon the reaction to CO2 doubling recently from 200ppm to 400ppm, if the average earth temperature were controlled by the greenhouse gas increases, all their predictions would have come true. IT DID NOT HAPPEN!
Instead the average earth temperature remains several degrees COOLER than the highs of the past 400,000 years of glacial cycles, following the pattern of climate change of every glacial cycle as shown by the peer reviewed data from the Dome Fugi ice core samples, in the graph on the U.S. Government's NOAA web site. (Link below).
About 5 million years ago, scientists agree that the glacial cycle over powered the orbital cycle (which was mathematically predictable) as the most powerful naturally occurring climate forcing event. They also are in agreement that they do not have the ability to quantify the causes of that change, let alone be able to mathematically, scientifically predict its reaction to the man caused introduction of green house gasses.
So why do they wonder why their predictions miss the mark? But as the Dome Fugi highs of the past 400,000 years suggest, and the UN IPCC FINALLY agrees by their statement recently: that it has been proven that the average earth temperature will rise at least another 2 degrees... The average earth temperature continues to follow the past 400,000 years of glacial cycles.
Even at the extremely rapid parabolic rate of increase in temperature over the past 100 years or so, which falls in line with the peer reviewed Dome Fugi analysis (replicated by the Vladivostok ice core analysis)... it will take several hundred years to exceed the past highs. Additionally scientists have pointed out the pattern of extremes of colder lows and warmer highs exhibited in the 400,000 year analysis. Thus it is highly likely that the UN prediction that the temperature will rise at least another 2 degrees is finally a prediction I can believe in.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/abrupt-climate-change/Glacial-Interglacial%20Cycles