https://eos.org/articles/congress-hears-biodiversity-warning-during-a-charged-hearing
Congress Hears Biodiversity Warning During a Charged Hearing
The nonprofit CO2 Coalition promotes positive contributions of carbon dioxide and pushed for the United States to withdraw from the Paris climate accord.
However, Watson sharply disputed the charge, saying that the numbers in the IPBES document are drawn from two distinct lines of evidence, including an independent analysis and a straight extrapolation of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Watson added that IUCN has endorsed the IPBES analysis.
Moore, who is an ecologist and a policy adviser to The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank based in Arlington Heights, Ill., also stated in his testimony, “As with the manufactured ‘climate crisis,’ they are using the specter of mass extinction as a fear tactic to scare the public into compliance. The IPBES itself is an existential threat to sensible policy on biodiversity conservation.”
Marc Morano, editor of ClimateDepot.com and a prominent climate change denier, according to the DeSmog blog, criticized Watson, whom he sat next to at the witness table. “[Watson] says it’s our last chance to save the planet. These are the words of a salesman, a science bureaucrat, not a disinterested…” Morano never finished that sentence because subcommittee chair Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) interrupted and told Morano to direct testimony to him.
Later in the hearing, Huffman castigated Morano, saying, “I don’t know what inspires someone to make a career of trolling scientists or monetizing contrarian ideology on the YouTube and Ted Talk circuit. But it’s just a very different kind of conversation than the science-based conversation I think many of us would like to try to have.”
“Shadowy Stuff”
Huffman criticized Republicans for choosing Morano and Moore as their witnesses.
“There’s a narrative around here [in Congress] that Republicans are coming around on science and climate. Look no further than the witnesses they continue to dredge out of the fever swamp for these subcommittee hearings, and you’ll see that they’ve got a long way to evolve,” Huffman told Eos in an interview. “This is shadowy stuff, and we see it week after week: instead of scientists, people from these junior varsity think tanks that they keep dredging up. Apparently, witnesses from QAnon and Infowars”—a conspiracy theory group and website, respectively—”were unavailable, and so this is what we get.”
Morano “brought a provocative, almost like a World Wrestling type of ethos to his testimony. There were very few facts and certainly no science. He admitted that, at the outset, he’s a political science guy, and he’s a former staffer to Jim Inhofe,” Huffman told Eos, referring to the Oklahoman senator who authored a book entitled The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. “[Morano] is here to throw bombs. It’s just a choice that the Republicans keep making in these hearings. Instead of serious policy conversations, serious science conversations, they want to do politics.”
Huffman said the way to counter the attacks on science is to present expert witnesses. “Well, look, we just presented you with four of the world’s leading scientists, for God’s sake. That’s probably where you start in countering that,” he said. “Then people can weigh for themselves: Do they want to consider the overwhelming weight of the world’s best scientists or the shadowy junior varsity think tank from people that used to work for Jim Inhofe?”
“Today, We Are That Asteroid.”
After the hearing, another witness said he was disappointed in the “antiscience view” expressed by Morano and Moore. “It’s hype. It’s bombast. It’s all of this stuff that is not based in reality,” Jacob Malcom, director of the Center for Conservation Innovation for Defenders of Wildlife, a Washington, D.C.–based conservation group, told Eos. “I don’t think it will ever go away. But as long as it stays marginalized, I think more and more people will see it for what it is.”Malcom, at the hearing, said that the last time there was a mass extinction “it happened because an asteroid hit the planet. Today, we are that asteroid.”
Watson, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 1997 to 2002, told Eos that perhaps Republicans chose Morano and Moore as their witnesses “because we have said”—in the IPBES report—“that climate change and biodiversity must be dealt with together.”
“I would have hoped that the Republicans would have chosen two very good scientists who could have debated the merits of the IPBES report rather than clearly someone who’s just a straight climate denier,” Watson said, referring to Morano.
