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Roger Pielke, Jr. was quoted in a Greenwire article on his House Science Committee testimony:
House subpanel targets link between extreme weather, global warming
by Jean Chemnick
Republican leaders of a House Science, Space and Technology subcommittee took aim today at what has become one of environmentalists’ most potent arguments for action on climate change: the view that global warming is driving more extreme weather events.
Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said at the top of the Environment Subcommittee hearing that Democrats in Congress and the White House routinely politicize natural disasters to shore up their agenda.
“Administration officials and the national media regularly use the impacts from hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts and floods to justify the need for costly climate change regulations,” he said.
Scientists warn against attributing any particular weather event to climate change, Smith noted. “The fact is, there is little evidence that climate change causes extreme weather events.”
But subcommittee ranking member Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) countered that the weather patterns are shifting. Individual events may not show global warming, she said, but “climate change challenges us to think in terms of decades of accumulated change.”
The federal government should do more to track those changes and communicate them to local communities, she said.
The subpanel heard from three witnesses, two of whom expressed a degree of skepticism about the effect of man-made emissions on weather.
Not only is human-caused warming not contributing to storms, droughts and other effects, but it doesn’t even exist, said John Christy, a professor of meteorology at University of Alabama, Huntsville, and a vocal climate change skeptic. Global average surface temperatures have not risen in 15 years, he said, alluding to the so-called climate change pause that is often cited by skeptics.
“Many claims have been made that weather events of the past 50 years are ‘unprecedented,’ and therefore must be caused by human influences,” he said. But models only show that those events — including storms and droughts — are unusual, not that they have not occurred in the past, he said.
In some cases, he said, events that are cited as the result of climate change are outstripped by trends that existed long before the Industrial Revolution, including the “mega droughts” of the medieval period.
Roger Pielke Jr., of the University of Colorado’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, said proponents of action to address emissions undermine their own argument when they claim a link between extreme weather and man-made emissions that hasn’t actually been established.
“If we begin using extreme events as kind of a poster child for energy policy, we’re doing a disservice to both debates,” he said. Read more…
