During a recent hearing on climate change before the U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Republican Congressman Mo Brooks got four members of a bipartisan panel of climate science experts to admit that humans are not responsible for the Earth’s global warming that began 20,000 years ago.
Brooks, arguing that sea levels have risen an average of two feet per century over the past 20,000 years (roughly double the global warming enthusiasts’ claimed average sea level rise rate of one foot per century since 1993), pointed out that global temperatures have risen, on average, roughly 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century over the past 20,000 years.
Noting that the Earth was too lightly populated by humans to make humanity responsible for the Earth’s global warming that began 20,000 years ago (almost all of Canada, Northern Europe, and America was under glacial ice and uninhabitable), Brooks asked Dr W. Tad Pfeffer, fellow at Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado Boulder, if, in his judgment, “human beings caused the global warming that started 20,000 years ago during the last glacial maximum?”
“No, no. Absolutely not. It is an example of spontaneous natural variability — one of the many ways that this whole system — whether you look at in terms of sea levels rising, temperatures, storms — can be varied,” responded Dr Pfeffer.
Brooks asked the same question to Dr Gabriel J. Wolkon, research scientist and manager, Climate and Cryosphere Hazards Program, Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys, Alaska Department of Natural Resources.
“No, absolutely not. That was a product of natural variability in the climate system. Yeah,” responded Dr Wolkon.
Brooks then threw the question at Dr Twila A. Moon, research scientist, National Snow and Ice Data Center’s (NSIDC) Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
“Humans weren’t around in nearly the numbers we are today, so we certainly were not available to be combusting fossil fuels at the rate we are today are putting emissions into the atmosphere. You can consider, we have built America in the last 243 years and we’re changing things at a much more rapid rate. So, I would agree that when it began 20,000 years ago when we were coming out of the last glacial that was not caused by humans. The warming of the last 100 years, most certainly was,” responded Dr Moon.
When Brooks posed the same question to Dr Robin E. Bell, Lamont research professor, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, he responded by saying:
“In my judgment, the variation that we were seeing 20,000 years ago was part of the pulse of the planet— it pulses at about 100,000 years, glacial or interglacial. When I started graduate school, we were expecting to go into the next glacial period, except that we as human beings in the last 100 years— and you can see the pick-up since we invented the seam engine— you can see the temperature moving up.”
If the Earth has been warming for 20,000 years, and humans have nothing to do with it, then who is to be blamed for climate change and global warming? Neither the scientists nor Brooks had the time to discuss or explain that.
For Brooks, though, “rocks tumbling into oceans cause sea levels to rise; the Antarctic ice sheet is growing, not shrinking; and the climate is always changing, the planet is always either heating up or cooling down”.
The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has been holding heated hearings on climate change as an excuse to pretend there’s uncertainty within the scientific community on whether human-made climate change is real – by asking ridiculous questions and targeting the only climate scientists in the room who seemed to take climate change seriously.
In 2017, four witnesses were asked to testify before the committee; only one of them — Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University — agreed with the other 97% of scientists who believe that human activity (like the burning of fossil fuels) is causing our planet to heat up.
Prior to the hearing, data released by the Yale Program on Climate Communication found that 70% of Americans believed that climate change is real; 53% believed that global warming is caused mostly by human activities; 75% wanted the US government to regulate heat-trapping carbon dioxide as a pollutant; and more than 70% of Americans trusted climate scientists on global warming.
