Discussion for article #242935
The concern should be a Republican from Texas who heads the House “Science” Committee pushing his agenda of global warning denial, rather than real scientists not using the scientific method to draw conclusions.
(Edit) Of course the overriding concern is why a global warming denier is in charge of the U.S. House Science Committee??!! This is akin to putting an avowed Creationist in charge of Evolution Studies at Harvard, Yale, The Sorbonne or at Cambridge.
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Some time ago the Bush administration commissioned a National Academy of Sciences study on global warming and again another on its heels hoping that the second study would refute the first.
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There should be a test to be able to sit on the House Science Committee - spell SCIENCE. I have a suspicion Lamar Smith wouldn’t be able to pass.
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I’m sleepy and maybe missed it – but how does the Commerce Dept. fit in here?
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I wonder how his grandchildren will feel about this 30 years from now.
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Benghazi. And this time, we mean it.
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Geben Sie mir Ihre Papiere!!! Machen schnell!!!
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Indeed. How dare a government agency share a publicly-funded study with the public instead of keeping it hidden in scientific journals the public won’t have access to. I’ll prepare the smelling salts.
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NOAA falls under the Department of Commerce.
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Slowing would be a relative term
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Lamar should also have a look into hair dye (or rug) providers, because I don’t they’re telling him the full story.
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Smith is actually trying to do something very dangerous: impose political control on scientific research. He has made several moves trying to make NIH, NSF, NOAA, and other organizations open up their research discussions. These discussions, about grants and researchers, held by scientists like me asked to review proposals and by the people in the government agencies, have to remain private in order to keep the discussion about the science and not political repercussions. More importantly, if we allow politicians to step in and decide what the “correct” scientific thought is, then we go down the road of every other civilization that has done so.
For example, during the Cold War the USSR imposed communistic thought onto their scientists. This lead to them following wrongheaded theories about crop production, which ended up with their from production failing. This is why the USSR was buying wheat from their enemy, the USA, in the middle of the Cold War. Smith and the Republicans are trying to push us down the exact same path (in this case to appease their wealthy donors as well as t heir political orthodoxy), but in this case the scientific failure will lead to unchecked climate change threatening billions.
This is a major issue that gets almost no coverage by the press (and none in mainstream sources), but it’s going to prompt a major change in how the US pursues science. Scientific progress is the backbone of what has made the US a world leader, but if the Republicans succeed they will destroy all of that.
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Prolly like the rest of us frogs in the pot of water that´s getting hotter.
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Har.
I notice he isn’t asking for the data, so that skeptical researchers could find evidence that it had been altered.
A few years back, skeptics were so sure that evidence of heating was based on flawed science that even the Koch Foundation helped bankroll an honest study. A prominent (also Koch-funded) skeptical blogger swore he would accept the results.
The Berkeley Earth group concluded that the warming trend is real, that over the past 50 years (between the decades of the 1950s and 2000s) the land surface warmed by 0.91±0.05°C, and their results mirrors those obtained from earlier studies carried out by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Hadley Centre, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis, and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The study also found that the urban heat island effect and poor station quality did not bias the results obtained from these earlier studies.
The blogger broke his oath, and the Berkeley project was pretty much the end of attempts by skeptics to use actual science to back up claims that global warm-mongers are performing lousy science.
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Thanks, superabound! I thought maybe that was it --but I’ve been doing housework since 4:00a.m. and just now am taking a decent breather and a mocha.
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Crud. I moved recently and just got around to checking if this turd is still my congressman. He is. Not that it makes much of a difference, since it’s between him and another Republican that no one in Austin would actually elect. But still, at least I’ve never heard of the other guy, which makes him marginally better than Smith.
But my dream some day is to actually have some say in who represents me in Congress, instead of being forced to accept a congressman elected by people who not only hate my beliefs but hate the entire city I live in. This isn’t how democracy is supposed to work.
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I wish Lamar would follow your example —
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I truly appreciate your comment regarding the hidden implications behind this idiot congressman’s objectives and the honest truth about keeping science out of the hands of politics. Thank you.
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Viva Vavilov!