Essay by Eric Worrall
Climate believers claim climate skepticism is in decline, that a growing number of people are concerned about climate change. But if this is the case, why are there so many elected climate skeptics?
Climate change deniers make up nearly a quarter of US Congress
Climate denialists – 23 in Senate and 100 in House – are all Republicans and make US an outlier internationally
Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor
Mon 5 Aug 2024 20.00 AESTLast modified on Tue 6 Aug 2024 00.51 AESTUS politics is an outlier bastion of climate denial with nearly one in four members of Congress dismissing the reality of climate change, even as alarm has grown among the American public over dangerous global heating, an analysis has found.
A total of 123 elected federal representatives – 100 in the House of Representatives and 23 US senators – deny the existence of human-caused climate change, all of them Republicans, according to a recent study of statements made by current members.
“It’s definitely concerning,” said Kat So, campaign manager for energy and environment campaigns at the Center for American Progress, who wrote the report.
…
“Of course the climate is changing,” the Texas senator Ted Cruz said in 2018. “The climate has been changing from the dawn of time. The climate will change as long as we have a planet Earth.”
…
“We’ve had freezing periods in the 1970s. They said it was going to be a new cooling period,” the Louisiana representative Steve Scalise said in a 2021 interview, referencing long-debunked research that is often still cited by climate deniers. “And now it gets warmer and gets colder, and that’s called Mother Nature. But the idea that hurricanes or wildfires were caused just in the last few years is just fallacy.”
…
“The amount of people at each end of the spectrum – alarmed and dismissive – were essentially tied back in 2013 but today there are three alarmed people for every one dismissive, so there’s been a fundamental shift in how people see climate change in the US,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in climate public opinion at Yale.
…Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University who has long studied anti-climate rhetoric, said it was “unsurprising” that the report found old-school climate denial is on the decline.
“It’s harder to deny the science when it’s so much more apparent that the climate is warming, that extreme weather is getting worse and happening constantly,” she said. “Nobody can deny the science with a straight face, given everything.”
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/05/climate-change-denial-congress
Activists like Oreskes claims climate skepticism is in decline, and climate concern is rising. But if this is the case, why are there so many elected climate skeptics in US politics? Why would people who are majorly concerned about climate change keep voting for representatives who oppose climate action?
I know this might be a difficult concept for climate activists and some climate scientists to grasp, but if your model disagrees with observations, you should keep the observations and discard the model.
Place in order of niceness. Caligula, Naome Oreskes, Ghengis Khan, Michel Mann, Vlad the Impaler, and Jack the Rippe. I will go for Caligula and all teh rest second equal, and they can fight it out until the last one stabnding
“but if your model disagrees with observations, you should keep the observations and discard the model.”
The brainwashed believe observations are a big oil conspiracy and that models which have been invalidated by observations are an unquestionable march towards doom.
Climate “scientists” ignore empirical data contrary to their phony studies based on false assumptions, false attributions, bias and circular reasoning. Cherry picking used to be considered scientific fraud but is standard practice today.
Kamala’s VP is a climate wacko who supports child mutilation.
US politics is an outlier bastion of climate denial
Getting a wee bit over emotional and hyberbolic there luvvy and you need to hop on a jet and get out of the office and out and about a bit more-
The Tesla EV bubble bursts – MacroBusiness
Just a helpful tip but I’d leave the UK off the itinerary just at present.
I used to go on healthy strolls around East London, most of the muggers I met turned out to be reasonable people after I remonstrated them firmly. But I’m not a young man anymore… 🙂
Now moving towards 50 years of planet experimentation and the AGW theory of climate alarm has already failed. No change in severe weather (if anything it’s actually less severe), no change in sea ice for decades now (stable) and sea levels are rising at a very small yearly increase that people won’t even notice over the next 100 years.
https://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah6
Still on track for nearer scenario C rather than B.
Rural Stations show the warming has been also exaggerated by Urban stations and adjustments.
Referring to the 70’s concern re global cooling these authors claim that the “long-debunked research that is often still cited by climate deniers“, lets see the debunking, I lived through that time and I don’t recall any debunking. Yes, it turned out that they were wrong in their prognostications but the same can be said of the current warming nonsense.
And that is because you can simply state ‘debunking’ which give people the impression that it has convincingly been done. That’s where the interest stops. On WUWT people actually engage w the subject matter, even though some (and we all know who they are) are doing their best to put spanners in the works because they a priori believe the AGW is true, and that Co2 is the driver which leads to all kinds of vibrational mindbending. Some people here will spot the irony in the last sentence. 😀
Climate Alarmists try to downplay the Human-caused Global Cooling scare of the 1970’s. It was taken seriously at the time. I lived through that time, too, and took particular interest in this theory, waiting eagarly for the details as to how human were causing the cooling. The details were never provided.
The reason Climate Alarmists want to downplay the Human-caused Global Cooling scare is because it turned out to be wrong, and Climate Alarmists don’t want anyone equating those wrong predictions to the current Climate Alarmist predictions about Human-caused Global Warming/Climate Change.
I’m still waiting eagerly for the details of how CO2 is causing the climate to change. No detalis have ever been provided.
So the Human-caused Global Cooling scare and the Human-caused Global Warming/Climate Change scare *are* equivalent. Neither hypothesis has ever been shown to be real.
Climate Alarmists don’t want others to look at it that way, so they dismiss the Human-caused Global Cooling scare for that reason.
Here’s a regonal temperature chart of the United States (Hansen 1999). It shows why people were concerned that the world might be cooling into another Ice Age. As you can see, the cooling in the 1970’s was equivalent to the cooling in the 1910’s, which was the coolest period since the Little Ice Age ended about 1850. When the temperatures cooled to this extent, people started getting concerned.
The bogus, bastardized global Hockey Stick temperature charts erased all these temperatue differences in their attempt to promote the Human-caused Global Warming narrative. That’s another reason the Climate Alarmists want to downplay the Global Cooling scare, because the Global Cooling scare refutes the Hockey Stick chart “hotter and hotter and hotter” temperature profile.
Of course, during the 1970’s, there were no bogus, bastardized Hockey Stick charts to mislead people.
Activists like Oreskes claims climate skepticism is in decline, and climate concern is rising. But if this is the case, why are there so many elected climate skeptics in US politics?
Could it be that there are now fewer climate realists in Congress than there were, say, ten years ago? It’s not the number that matters, it’s the direction. Is the number getting greater? Is the number staying the same? Is the number getting smaller?
Moreover, people don’t just vote on the issue of climate. WUWT has published umpteen surveys showing that climate is not the number one issue on the list of issues which concern voters.
So it’s perfectly possible for there to be “so many” people in Congress who are climate realists when (assuming that is true) the number of people who have been conned into believing that there is a climate emergency is rising. You don’t need a degree in logic to spot that.
3/4? We got to get that to 90% or higher.
Is anyone else amused that Oreskes used to work for an oil company?
People on Earth are the same as ants on a cruise ship and have no more control over the climate as we do the steering.
Dress for weather and accept climate. It is reality.
I, for one, am relieved to hear that almost a quarter of our politicians are not blooming idiots!
I am surprised that not a single Democrat/Independent/Socialist is not smart enough to recognize this hoax. Senator Manchin would be a candidate for a thinking man, but I guess he didn’t make the grade after all.
Well, for a start: ‘being a public representative does not make you per se educated about climate, competent to talk about it nor do anything other than take funding bungs from climate lobbyists’.
If you look at the UK Parliament, for example, there is absolutely no-one with the letters MP after their name that has a higher degree in any hard sciences subject. It is jammed packed full of lawyers (far too many of them human rights lawyers), political animals who have done nothing in life but study Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford before joining the Westminster village as useful idiots/SPADs/otherwise serving the political cartel. There is no ‘former head of R+D for BP’ or the like; there is no ‘atmospheric chemist’ not tied to IPCC/UN/’global warming’ money there. There is no solar physicist, there is no expertise on the earth’s magnetic field, there is no geologist with research expertise on deep sea cores, with detailed knowledge of the use of isotope ratios for dating samples etc etc.
So why on earth would any sane person look to a Parliament to find understanding of one of the more complex matters in modern science, when not one of them has ever read detailed treatises on the topic, mainly because none of them would be capable of understanding the first word that they would be reading?
The evidence that climate has changed markedly in the past 10,000 years, comes from a combination of the following methods:
There is a great danger of people saying: ‘the most accurate measurement regimens have only been around for 100 years, so nothing before that is relevant’.
Everything before that is relevant. Its relevance is that it shows clearly that climate has changed radically during the past 10,000 years. It changes even more radically over 100,000 year cycles. It changes in cylical ways within shorter-term regimens; and in step-change ways between ice ages and interglacials. When looking over millions of years, the changes in global climate the past 200 years are minimal. Absolutely minimal.
The only radical change the past 50 years has been the hysterical community of charlatan grant-seeking pseudo-scientists; politicians looking for new sources of bungs; communities of charlatans looking for government hand-outs; the UN emerging as the Pope of climate science (trying to make out it is infallible); the media becoming a bunch of drug-addicted climate bedwetters; and the framing of climate catastrophe in ways that the dupable general public believe what they are told.
What is needed is to change all the changes of the past 50 years, restore proper values to climate science and be honest about what normal climate variability actually looks like.
8C changes in 10-year average temperatures were recorded at high latitude in the early 20th century betwen 1900-1910 and 1920-1930. The world has not ended 94 years later!
When Hubert Lamb documented that difference in his book ‘Climate: Present, Past and Future’ , it was simply an observation. He was not wetting his pants…..