If you want a feel for how the recent climate controversies surrounding the University of East Anglia and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are playing out in the public policy arena, the United States Senate is a good place to begin. Within the Senate, you might start with the Environment and Public Works Committee, and it would make sense to drop in when Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson just happens to be testifying a day after laying out her plans to regulate greenhouse gases (Washington Post, New York Times).
Such was the scene in a hearing room on Capitol Hill Tuesday, when what should have been an ordinary budget hearing blew up into a debate about the existence of global warming. Not about the uncertainties, potential impacts or what to do about it, but whether it exists and is in any way driven by mankind. It was as if the clock had been turned back six years at the environment committee, which has primary jurisdiction over climate regulation and remains home to one of the most notable skeptics in the world, Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe.
As chairman of the committee when Republicans ruled the Senate, Inhofe famously called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” On Tuesday he released a minority report on the UAE affair and spent his time explaining how the leaked emails and data quality issues at the IPCC prove him correct.
“They cooked the science,” Inhofe said, incorrectly suggesting that CRU Director Phil Jones heads the IPCC and basically manages the entire climate science agenda. Arguing that the IPCC has been “totally discredited,” he told Jackson EPA should withdraw its finding that greenhouse gases pose a risk to human welfare and review the science rather than push forward with regulations that would “destroy” the US economy. “That’s my question,” he told Jackson.
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“I have a two-word answer: I disagree,” Jackson replied. “I do not believe that the IPCC has been totally discredited.”
Clearly the IPCC has not been totally discredited, but the hearing itself proved that its stature as the ultimate authority on global warming has been seriously damaged. When pressed by Inhofe, Jackson said the core science is based on multiple lines of evidence and work by many individuals and institutions – not just the IPCC.
Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, California Democrat, went out of her way to distance the science of global warming from the IPCC itself, pointing out that American researchers, federal agencies and scientific institutions have done their own analyses and uniformly reported that anthropogenic global warming is real. “We are now seeing colleagues attack America’s most respected institutions,” she said.
The fact that the IPCC is an organization made up of scientists from all over the world – including many of those same American scientists – seemed to get lost in the hearing, as did the fact that the IPCC does not actually do its own science but rather assesses the scientific literature. But more importantly, at least on this particular day, the IPCC was treated as a liability rather than an asset in the push for greenhouse gas regulations.
It’s not entirely clear how the affair has affected the main climate negotiations, which continue among lawmakers outside of this committee. Barring a major breakthrough, however, it seems that Jackson will have to follow through with her plans and take the lead on greenhouse gases.