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OPINION

Cruz Chills Clueless Sierra Club Wth Climate Facts

Larry Bell By Monday, 12 October 2015 07:57 AM EDT Current | Bio | Archive

Presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, effectively dismantled “settled science” climate alarm claims with unsettling reality during an Oct. 6 Senate Judiciary subcommittee exchange with Sierra Club President Aaron Mair.

Whereas the hearing chaired by Cruz was intended to investigate harmful effects of government overregulation on people and businesses in general — not just the EPA — Mair’s testimony made climate the central issue.

His written pre-statements charged that EPA foes live in “an alternative universe” where corporate “polluters” (CO2 plant food producers) use propaganda to persuade low-income Americans to oppose anti-pollution efforts.

He asserted that “people of color and low-income communities are disproportionately impacted by pollution and climate disruption should not be up for debate any more so than the science behind climate change itself.”

In response, Cruz emphasized that climate alarm-premised EPA overregulation “is stifling opportunity for people who want to achieve the American dream.”

He also challenged any scientific basis for Mair’s testimony during the hearing that “our planet is cooking and heating up and warming,” asking him if he was aware that satellite data has shown no warming trend over the past 18 years.

When Mair denied this evidence, Cruz asked him if he was familiar with broad recognition, even among alarmists, of a global warming pause. Following an extended pause of his own to confer with an equally befuddled staff member sitting behind him, Mair replied that the pause reference related to climate conditions “in the ’40s.”

Aaron Mair repeatedly refused to answer Cruz as to whether or not the Sierra Club would abandon its views on climate change if confronted with solid evidence. When Mair repetitively cited an alleged 97 percent consensus among climate scientists that “the science is settled” Cruz correctly pointed out that this claim was based upon “one bogus study.”

That fabrication originated from an endlessly reported 2009 American Geophysical Union survey consisting of an intentionally brief two question online survey sent to 10,257 Earth scientists by two researchers at the University of Illinois.

Of the about 3.000 who responded, only a small subset of those, just 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate science journals, were considered in their survey statistic.

That anything-but-scientific survey asked two questions. The first: “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?”

Few would be expected to dispute that the planet began thawing out of the “little ice age” in the middle 19th century, predating the Industrial Revolution. (That was the coldest period since the last real ice age ended roughly 12,000 years ago.)

The second question asked: “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”

Not addressed were what measures constituted “significant”. . . whether “changing” included both cooling and warming (and for “better” and “worse”) . . . or if significant contributions in responses included land use changes such as agriculture and deforestation.

Pressed repeatedly to answer whether the Sierra Club would change its position based upon publicly available satellite measurements showing a warming pause (despite rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations and failed model predictions), Mair would only respond: “We concur with 97 percent of the scientists that believe the anthropogenic [human-caused] impact of mankind with regards to global warming are true.”

Asked again if Mair was unwilling to answer the question, the Sierra Club head replied: “We concur with the preponderance of the evidence — you’re asking me if we’ll take 3 percent over 97 percent? Of course not.”

Countering Mair’s unsupported assertions that “global temperatures are on the rise,” Cruz stated that we are being asked not to “pay attention to your lying eyes . . . don’t debate the science.”

He observed: “You know, Mr. Mair, I find it striking that for a policy organization that purports to focus exclusively on environmental issues, that you are not willing to tell this committee that you would issue a retraction if your testimony is objectively false under scientific data . . . That undermines the credibility of any organization.”

Following the hearing Cruz called it “astonishing” to hear the head of the Sierra Club defend EPA regulations based upon pseudoscience. This is particularly true within the context of a Senate inquiry addressing disproportionate EPA regulatory policy impacts upon “people of color and low-income communities.”

EPA’s latest climate alarm-marketed regulatory scheme will force utilities to obtain about 28 percent of all U.S. capacity from anemic and unreliable renewable sources by 2030.

That Obama administration war on so-called carbon “pollution” will come at a very high cost to electricity consumers, with disproportionate burdens falling upon exactly those disadvantaged populations. Now that’s an anthropogenic problem the Sierra Club, along with the rest of us, should truly worry about.

Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) and the graduate program in space architecture. He is the author of “Scared Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom”(2015) and “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax” (2012). Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
 

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LarryBell
Presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, effectively dismantled “settled science” climate alarm claims with unsettling reality during an Oct. 6 Senate Judiciary subcommittee exchange with Sierra Club President Aaron Mair.
climate, global warming, cruz
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2015-57-12
Monday, 12 October 2015 07:57 AM
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