You know the EPA made its endangerment finding on greenhouse gases for a reason: There are a number of ways in which human health is now being harmed or threatened by climate changes including steadily rising temperatures and temperature extremes. An article just out in a peer-reviewed journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), Preparing a People: Climate Change and Public Health, indicates the devastating impact that heat waves have on people and that public health directors in over 130 cities surveyed in the US are well aware of the threats to public health associated with a changing climate.
Meanwhile, across town, the decidedly non-scientifically oriented Republican majority in the House of Representatives is continuing its attempt to drag down what has been proven science for decades. They are trying to prove, once and for all, the Ministry of Truth’s dictum that “Ignorance is Strength.” Paul Krugman highlights their efforts today in his column: The Truth, Still Inconvenient.
Last week, the Science & Technology Committee held another in a series of hearings with a cast designed to support the GOP’s relentless Know-Nothingism. There was a surprise, though, for the Denialists: One of the scientists that they were counting on to give succor to their agenda came out with testimony that supported the science – the real climate science. Ouch. As the LA Times reports here: “A team of UC Berkeley physicists and statisticians that set out to challenge the scientific consensus on global warming is finding that its data-crunching effort is producing results nearly identical to those underlying the prevailing view.” The study, principally funded by the Koch Brothers, expected to find that existing climate science was wrong. The scientists in this group couldn’t get there.
The lead scientist, Richard Muller, has been a well-known skeptic. Now he’s an apostate to the climate zombies who thought he’d toe the party line. Krugman decries the lack of seriousness on the part of the committee leadership. “But what we had, instead of high seriousness, was a farce: a supposedly crucial hearing stacked with people who had no business being there and instant ostracism for a climate skeptic who was actually willing to change his mind in the face of evidence.”
So while the health not only of the planet, but of we humans who live here, is in jeopardy from climate change, and the science underlying our understanding of these things continues to be borne out, there are relentless, pernicious special interests and ideologues who would further endanger us.
