US House Science Committee Leadership - It's Even Worse Than You Think
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We point out the coincidental timing of Smith’s subcommittee assignments and NOAA’s report because it is on climate change that the Republican members of Smith’s committee keep science at farthest arm’s length. The representatives picked by Smith to chair the panel’s half-dozen subcommittees either deny that human activity contributes to global warming and a changing climate or they demur on the issue by saying “the jury’s still out.”
Last year’s average temperature was 55.3 degrees, NOAA reported Tuesday, which was 1 degree above the previous record set in 1998 and 3.2 degrees higher than the average recorded during the 20th century. One record-setting year might be considered an aberration if it weren’t another piece in an accumulating set of global data that points to a dangerously warming planet.
But those who deny carbon dioxide emissions from human sources are warming the Earth are well-represented on Smith’s committee. The panel’s vice chairman, for example, is Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California. Rohrabacher is “probably the equivalent in the House of Sen. Inhofe in the Senate in terms of challenging global warming,” according to Marc Marano, a former aide to Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma. Inhofe once infamously declared that “man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Rohrabacher’s contribution to the anti-climate change book of quotations was to joke about “dinosaur flatulence” and clear-cutting rain forests as causes of past climate changes and possible solutions to the current one, since rotting organic material on forest floors naturally emit carbon dioxide.
The vice chairman of the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, is another climate change denier who has expressed wonderment at all the fuss regarding global warming and carbon dioxide levels. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “means that plant life grows better,” he once said.
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http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/house-science-panel-sees-no-climate-change/nTrM2/
