Luetkemeyer aims at UN ‘junk science’
Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer
WASHINGTON — Missouri Republicans are in the thick of the Washington fight to defeat global warming legislation, and Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer opened up a new front this afternoon with legislation to strip funding from the UN group overseeing climate research.
Along with a broadside against the United Nations, Luetkemeyer, R-St. Elizabeth, introduced a bill prohibiting contributions from the United States to the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Folks in Missouri and across the country are tired of this never-ending spending spree, and my goal is to deliver some of our people’s hard-earned money back into their pocketbooks instead of spending it on international junk science,” Luetkemeyer said in a news release.
The panel in question, which included hundreds of scientists from more than 100 countries, famously authored a series of reports two years ago concluding that global climate change is “very likely” to have a human cause.
The panel predicted that global temperatures would rise by anywhere from 3.2 to 7.2 degrees by the end of the century, accelerating the melting of glaciers and the rise of the world’s oceans and leading to potentially catastrophic effects.
The panel was awarded the Nobel Prize for its work — something that doesn’t seem to impress Luetkemeyer. The first-term congressman observed that hundreds of international scientists have criticized the UN panel report.
“We all know that the UN is incompetent when it comes to spending money, and that is why American taxpayers should not be forking over millions more to one of its organizations that not only is in need of significant reform but is engaged in dubious scientific quests,” he wrote.
Given the strength of those accusations, we contacted Stephen Schneider, a biology professor at Stanford University and one of the authors of the reports in question.
Schneider said that every chapter of the reports had hundreds of reviewers, many of them cutting-edge scientists. He argued that many who have challenged the results have little expertise in matters related to climate.
“To characterize what we did as junk science is, frankly, a joke,” he said.
Referring to Luetkemeyer and others in Congress who have attacked the conclusions, he added: “That’s coming from people who wouldn’t know quality science if it sat on their laps and spoke to them.”
Stephen Schneider isn’t exactly the source you can go to for unbiased scientific reporting. Short of James Hansen, who has taken to getting arrested at coal plants, Schneider is the number two rent-seeker when it comes to getting global warming publicity.
Schneider:
“To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios,
make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.”
He’s a politician with an agenda now, grubbing after more money. The IPCC is a political organization that used a lot of questionable bureaucratic data massaging to reach their conclusions, which is why it’s so far off on its predictions. Seriously - are you going to buy the hundreds of reviewers comment? What type of process works like that? Hundreds of reviewers, and no one had questions, corrections? The report covered all the reviews? Please - that’s not science.
Try http://wattsupwiththat.com. It will shake the core of your belief climate change is settled. It will also bother you that you haven’t heard much of this anywhere in the mainsteam press.