From Politico
Leading House climate skeptic Jim Sensenbrenner appears to have landed a perch to lead investigations into global warming science.
The Wisconsin Republican is set to become the vice chairman of the House Science Committee under incoming Chairman Ralph Hall (R-Texas), Hall told POLITICO Thursday.
“With his background, his insistence, he can do the mean things that we don’t want to do,” Hall said. “I’m a peaceful guy; he likes combat.”
Sensenbrenner, who has served as the top Republican on the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming since 2007, tried to keep the panel alive to investigate the Obama administration’s global warming policies, but was shot down by GOP leadership.
Sensenbrenner agreed to take the No. 2 spot on the Science Committee in exchange for Hall’s backing in two years when his term limit runs out, according to a Republican select committee spokesman.
As one of the Republicans leading the charge against the science underpinning the Obama administration’s climate policies, Sensenbrenner is expected to take a lead role on investigations.
“I’ve had a reputation of really being a tiger on oversight,” he said in September.
Elsewhere on the Science Committee, Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) will become chairman of the Investigations and Oversight subpanel next year.
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Sense Seeker says: “AussieDan, can you be a bit more specific about those publications about UHI? So far I have only found publications showing the effect to be very small, but I admit I didn’t run a systematic research. Can you give a reference? Thanks.”
I’ll save AussieDan the trouble. You seem insincere, Seeker, since you obviously made little or no effort to find skeptical UHI publications. I’d suggest you use the search box at the top of the WUWT header and search on “UHI.” That will lead you to a good half dozen or more posts on the subject.
I don’t want to see Michael Mann hung drawn or quartered. Those days went out with pikes and rusty armour. I just live to hear him be Mann enough to admit he stuffed the science up, i.e. sort of fall on his hockeystick so to speak!
Now Gavin, get him to write “forgive me for I have sinned against the purity of science” 1000 times and then be allowed to prop up Michael on his HS!!
Jim Sensenbrenner is a good man, and he will do well on the House Science Committee.
As for “Climategate,” I would prefer that the Committee call EPA folks into the room and grill them for a while on their thinking and their process in making the endangerment finding they made that is provoking these new CO2 regulations they propose. That is the way that the science can be brought to bear on the issue.
Examination of Jones, Briffa and Mann – under oath (with threat of perjury and charges of fraud) by a well-prepared prosecuting-type attorney armed with just a few key questions – asked ‘softly’ – ought to clarify the minds of those whose stock in trade is bluster and obfuscation.
And then – let’s compare the answers ….
We’re talking about re-wiring the global economy for chrissake! With MASSIVE taxes and creation of global governance !
I’m not so worried about being perceived as ‘mean’. We have to bring some clarity to this debate given that the Team have doubled down.
You folks, I think, have it wrong. This House Investigation Committee will not be about getting facts of science right. It will be a criminal investigating committee. The Committee can call upon anyone in the US to testify, and there will be hard and definitive questions asked. Anyone refusing to testify will go directly to prison for contempt of Congress. Most likely, there will be, in person, unidentified witnesses, testifying behind curtains, probably through voice modulation devices. To prevent retaliation against the witnesses. Mice squeal on the rats that were at play. This is serious business.
I saw this sort of thing happen before . . . back in the 1950s. The House Investigation Committee on unamerican activities. Much blood was shed then, heads rolled and a good many served time in prison.
I expect more of these House investigation committees the next 2 years.
J. West;
kind of hypocritical about Palin, aren’t you? Her errors/1000 statements are about 10% of Obama’s, both in frequency and seriousness.
Hearings in January, with snow piled high.
Maybe we can hope for truth. It would be nice if the ClimateGate affair were looked at, as well as the Phil Jones testimony.
Maybe he can ask scientists how to get milk from frozen cow udders in order to make that delightful Wisconsin cheese.
Uli Harms, the executive secretary of the international drilling program, said he thought the hole had penetrated through the sediment from four ice ages. “That would be my personal guess,” he said, adding that the findings had to be checked in laboratories.
The project has presented a logistical challenge. The scientists have been working on the platform around the clock in 12-hour shifts, taken there and back at sunrise and sunset in a small boat, the only one on the lake. Because of the high concentration of salt in the unusually buoyant water, the vessel needs constant maintenance.
“We are making history here,” said Gideon Amit, of the National Institute of Oceanography, who is responsible for the marine operations.
Mr. Lazar said the wildly varying layers of salt and mud represented dry periods and wet ones, respectively. A tiny fragment of wood, which Mr. Lazar said he was guarding like gold, was found stuck in some mud, indicating that it was probably from a tree carried here by a flood.
The gravel, similar to that found today on the shores of the Sinai Peninsula, may mean that the waters in this basin had sunk much lower in the past than had been previously thought. In light of contemporary concern over the drop in the Dead Sea’s waters, mainly due to human intervention, the scientists found some room for hope, because the lake had reached even lower levels in history and managed to bounce back.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/world/middleeast/18deadsea.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a22
looks like some hot new core samples that MANN wont manage to massage:-)
4 possibly ice ages:-)
lets see mainstream avoid this hot potato
Sarah Palin was wrong in the way she said it. The issue is that the tree-ring data diverged from the warming temperature average towards the end of the study period, so they pinned plain old temperature averages to the tree-ring data minus the segment of tree-ring data that didn’t mirror temperature rise. Then they titled the graph as tree-ring data. It was not. It was a spliced combination of tree-ring and temperature data. The text did not clearly reference this. The text did not admit the divergence and the splice. The temperature was not declining. The tree-ring data was.
This Wisconsin guy ought to develop a set of criteria for accepting research into the congressional record. I have a few suggestions for that criteria, as do many of the posters and commentators here. And it should be an equal set of criteria for both sides of the debate.
For starters, the research must have a written report published in journals or online and freely available to other researchers and the public for a period of one year, and its data, in all raw and computerized forms, available free to other researchers, including the public, for a period of one year, prior to entering it into the congressional record.
Unpublished research should be considered as equal to published research under the criteria.
I meant to say that research not accepted for traditional peer-reviewed journal publication should be considered equal to traditionally published research as long as the criteria is met. This is to avoid the political machinations of certain journals.
Let’s hope that the House Committee members talk with Senator James Inhofe, who has been battling the insanity for several years, and his website is a great place for information. Unfortunately for truth and science credibility, the Socialist Democrats took control in 2006, and stopped the senate effort.
Pamela Gray: “The temperature was not declining. The tree-ring data was.”
Are you 100% sure of that? With the recent Zhang paper on UHI showing it to be as much as 7C to 9C in the summer in the northeast USA, are you really sure that all the miniscule .6C rise wasn’t caused by UHI? Using anecdotal evidence, I suspect the 1930s were really the hottest decade ever in the USA and all current warming is just UHI artifacts.
“With his background, his insistence, he can do the mean things that we don’t want to do,” Hall said. “I’m a peaceful guy; he likes combat.”
Good to hear he has a backbone, but I wouldn’t call that “mean”. Also glad to hear he likes combat. He’s going to see a lot of it.
I don’t know if he’s the most qualified for the job, and frankly I don’t give a damn. Sometimes you just need to call in the Enforcer, and this is one of those times.
Give ’em heck, Jimmy.
Billybob, I don’t know the answer to that question. I was referring to the two data sets in the Mann study. I can’t tell you whether or not either data set was contaminated. I can say that there was apparently a divergence between the tree ring data and the temperature data. It appeared to show warming but at that moment, the tree ring data appeared to be showing cooling. So to avoid the problem of explaining this divergence, the splice was made to hide what the researchers referred to as the “decline” in tree-ring proxy. Once this trick was uncovered, one would have to question the ability of tree rings, and especially a very small sample of tree rings, to be a proxy for temperature at any point along the smoothed average.
G.L. Alston says on December 17, 2010 at 2:51 pm
Nonsense in turn. The loss of the election was due to the media being in the tank for Obama and unwilling to subject him to the sort of intense and over the top investigation that Palin got. It has been disgusting to watch the way they treated Obama with kid gloves while unleashing all sorts of hypocritical lies about Palin.
She was at least as qualified as Obama was, if not more.
If you are a moderate republican then it seems to me you are also an unthinking one.
Sense Seeker says:
December 17, 2010 at 3:55 pm
Mmm, putting a typical big-money-loving politician like Jim Sensenbrenner in charge of a Science Committee is unlikely to be good for science.
———-
And stacking the leadership of many of our scientific societies with back-door-appointed political hack ideologues was good for science?
Leonard Weinstein says:
December 17, 2010 at 1:23 pm (Edit)
Bruce,
I think Mosher is reasonably even handed in one sense. That does not mean he has the same threshold to issues as you do, but he has generally shown good balance on the whole. There is a difference between bad behavior and illegal behavior, and he seems to be responding only to the later.
#######
Thanks. Part of that discipline was imposed by Tom. I think our focus was to look for cases of wrong doing that were “illegal” It was two weeks into the affair befire we decided to write the book. I wrote to andrew Revkin on the 19th and said follow the FOIA. If you follow the FOIA you GET the rest of the story. you get how the boorish stuff got amplified in battle into the tricky stuff and then into the illegal stuff.
But two weeks in this is what i saw.
Skeptic: The science is a fraud, the hide the decline of temperatures.
Defenders: it was just boys behaving badly, and oh, it was not temperatures.
And the FOIA story was always back burnered. Practically speaking I wanted to focus on things that could not be spun so heavily. where could I make a case. airtight.
The more people focused on the flimsy stuff ( True its bothersome) the easier time the team had defending.
Pamela, I understand what “Hide the Decline” was about. Attacking Sarah Palin for not getting it perfect is part of the ritual Masonic Handshake that lefties (even ones pretending to be libertarians) do to communicate that they really want to belong in the establishment club.
Pamela, “I can say that there was apparently a divergence between the tree ring data and the temperature data. ”
Well, anyone who believes the current temperature is what GISS or CRU or NOAA says is hopelessly naive.
I think Palin’s op-ed demonstrated she really does know what is going on – a great big scam.