Energy Secretary Moniz at House Hearing on U.S. Climate Action
The evidence is overwhelming, the science is clear, and the threat from climate change is real and urgent. This is my judgment and it is the almost universal judgment of the scientific community.
In other words, he read the 97% claim on John Cook’s web site, and knows nothing about the actual state of scientific knowledge.
The basic science behind climate change is simple: greenhouse gases make the earth warmer, and we are emitting more and more of them into the atmosphere.
The basic science shows that adding more CO2 has very little impact on the temperature. Predictions of catastrophic warming are based on feedbacks – from models which have wildly overpredicted past warming.
The threat of a warming planet to our communities, our infrastructure and our way of life is also clear.
No it isn’t. There isn’t any evidence of that at all.
Rising sea levels and increasingly severe droughts, heat waves, wildfires, and major storms are already costing our economy billions of dollars a year and these impacts are only going to grow more severe.
Sea level has been rising for 20,000 years, and tide gauges show no change in the rate of sea level rise over the past century. Tide gauges and satellites show no sea level rise at all on the west coast for over three decades. The EPA says that the worst heatwaves occurred in the 1930s. Droughts were much worse in the 1930s and 1950s. This past summer had the fewest 100 degree readings in a century. The US has gone over eight years since a major hurricane strike, the longest such period on record. Tornadoes are at a record low. The US experienced the fewest fires in three decades this year.
Every single claim Moniz made is patently false. He is either a liar or an idiot.
Common sense demands that we take action.
Common sense tells us that China is producing far more CO2 than we are, and even if CO2 was a problem, there is nothing the US could do about it.
