Lamar Smith claims climate scientists not following scientific method

Illinois Representative Bill Foster summed up today’s hearing of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology as “a very strange mixture of science and not.” Entitled “Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method,” the hearing provided a platform for Committee Chairman Lamar Smith to pursue his latest attack on climate science. He says researchers in the area have left behind the scientific method.

Smith went after climate scientists right in the statement he used to open the hearing, saying, “Far too often, alarmist theories on climate science originate with scientists who operate outside the principles of the scientific method.” He went on to say that “all too often, scientists ignore the basic tenets of science.” Smith singled out climate projections such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), saying that any predictions made to the end of this century are simply not credible.

“Alarmist predictions amount to nothing more than wild guesses,” he said.

Why would scientists be making these “guesses”? Smith had an answer for that, too. “Their ultimate goal,” he said, “is to promote a personal agenda, even if the evidence doesn’t support it.” He once again reiterated his accusations against the scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who had updated the agency’s temperature records, saying that “this was done to arrive at politically correct results.”

The testimony was stacked with scientists who reject the overall conclusions of the scientific community, so you might expect Smith’s accusations to get a strong backing. Yet only one of the hearing’s experts provided him any sort of intellectual cover. And the rest was the sort of intellectual chaos that led to Representative Foster’s description.

Is this science?

The only scientist who suggested that climate science might have lost its method was John Christy, who maintains one of the satellite temperature records of the lower atmosphere. Christy’s argument is that he has compared the climate model projections of the lower atmosphere’s temperatures to his satellite measurements, and they don’t line up. Thus, the climate consensus “fails to represent reality” and has been “scientifically falsified,” he said. By implication, continuing to accept the consensus is departing from science.

But Penn State’s Mike Mann, the sole representative of mainstream scientific views, suggested that Christy’s graph was a bit misleading. He noted that when corrected for various errors, the satellite measurements line up well with the surface temperatures, and those have set “warmest year yet” records each of the last three years. This surge in heat puts them well within the statistical error in the IPCC projections—Christy had omitted the statistics from his slide.

While the back-and-forth was notable for having focused on the science, several committee members noted that a lot of the science was absent. Christy and Mann were joined by Judith Curry, emeritus professor at Georgia Tech and another high-profile skeptic, as well as Roger Pielke, who doesn’t currently study the climate. “The witness panel does not really represent the vast majority of climate scientists,” said Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon, noting “we’d need 96 more Dr. Manns.”

That wasn’t the only mention of the idea that there’s a consensus on climate change among 97 percent of working scientists, and it eventually led to an interjection by Smith, who termed the idea “bogus” while arguing it was based “on a small sample of a small sample.” He placed some articles on the record saying as much.

Smith also had a testy interjection when Mann mentioned that he had recently spoken at a meeting of the Heartland Institute, a think tank that questions the basic science of climate change. Smith objected to Mann calling the organization “climate deniers,” and after Mann read a description of Smith’s talk at Heartland from Science magazine, Smith said, “That is not known as an accurate writer or magazine.” Yes, the self-appointed arbiter of the scientific method dissed one of science’s most significant journals. Instead of Science, he later submitted a Wall Street Journal editorial for the record.

What’s certain?

But testy exchanges weren’t limited to those Smith was having with reality. Two committee members asked Mann to provide evidence that he was not associated with a group called the Climate Accountability Institute, which has suggested that climate deniers might be prosecuted under the RICO statute. The representatives then complained when Mann had difficulty understanding what would provide evidence of a negative. There was some sniping among the witnesses, too. Mann awkwardly referred to Curry as a denier in his written testimony, then split linguistic hairs when called on to explain his statement. He, Curry, and Pielke have all had heated exchanges in the past, and a lot of that history spilled out during the hearing. Only Christy chose to avoid the opportunity to rehash old arguments.

Some of those old arguments related to Pielke’s work. Pielke accepts that climate change will create problems and actually argued for a carbon tax at one point in the hearing. But he’s also notable for questioning whether any of the impacts of climate, such as extreme weather, are actually being felt. He’s probably most notable for having published a piece claiming that climate change isn’t responsible for rising disaster costs. (Criticism of that piece led his editor to respond and publish a rebuttal.)

And he repeated the arguments here: no form of extreme weather is showing a trend, either in the US or globally, he said. In fact, he argued that the events were just too subject to random factors for trends to appear yet. Mann responded by citing recent papers that ascribe the severity of recent events to climate change—a slightly different issue but relevant to the discussion. (There are also indications that there are visible trends if you look at specific regions. For example, increased drought in the US Southwest may be balanced by the higher rain that’s happening in the east, making sure there’s no national trend.)

This is an area where new research is reducing uncertainty, which would suggest a successful application of the scientific method. But that suggestion showed no signs of registering on Smith.

Curry and Mann also had an exchange about the science. When asked about what’s going on with Antarctic ice, Curry provided a very indirect answer that focused on uncertainties due to past measurement issues and regional differences. Mann helpfully pointed out that we now have satellites (called GRACE) that measure ice, and we know we’re losing it.

Curry’s main theme was that there’s uncertainty the rest of the field won’t admit to, and she cited disputes over the role of clouds, how the ocean transports heat, ocean oscillations, and indirect solar effects. To her, these uncertainties are so large that it doesn’t even make it very likely we’ll see any effect if we continue carbon emissions as usual. Most scientists have concluded otherwise, saying that these uncertainties aren’t large enough to outweigh the impact of human warming. Curry dismissed this line of thinking as the result of “a consensus-seeking process that stifles debate” and “the gutter tactics of the academic debate.” She closed her testimony by saying, “Let’s make scientific debate about climate change great again.”