Republicans give platform to climate science deniers at hearing on biodiversity
Conservative members of Congress called on climate change deniers at hearing on endangered species
When Democrats in control of the House scheduled a hearing for international scientists to explain their warnings that humans are critically wounding biodiversity on Wednesday, conservative members of Congress called on career climate science deniers to testify alongside them. …
Republicans on a natural resources subcommittee called two prominent science deniers to criticize a landmark report that 1m species are at risk of extinction – largely because of humans, including because of rising temperatures from fossil fuel use and other unsustainable activities…
The conservatives invited Marc Morano, who founded a website to question climate science, and Patrick Moore, the chairman of the CO2 Coalition – which falsely argues that more carbon is good for the planet.
The panel’s chairman and top Democrat, California’s Jared Huffman, accused the two of “trolling” the scientists who helped spearhead the report for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
“I don’t know what inspires someone to make a career out of trolling scientists,” Huffman said, referring to the witnesses as being from “the shadowy corners of these junior varsity thinktanks”.
Morano was formerly communications director for the GOP senator James Inhofe but now refers to himself as an investigative journalist. He said the report’s claims that societal transformation is needed to protect and restore nature are “the latest UN appeal” for “more money and more regulatory control of the economy and people’s lives”.
Moore said humans putting carbon dioxide into the environment “are the salvation of life on Earth”.
And Tom McClintock, the panel’s ranking Republican from California, insisted inaccurately that there was “a vigorous debate in the scientific community over how human activity compares with vastly more powerful natural influencers that have driven climate change for four-and-a-half billion years”.
