About 97 percent of active climate scientists believe that climate change is real and dangerous and that human activity is a significant cause.
Almost as high a percentage of the Republicans serving on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology – 91 percent – disbelieve the notion, either in part or in full. Twenty of 22 GOP members of the committee, our research has found, aren't just unwilling to come to grips with the reality of man-made global warming. Most are clearly hostile to the notion.
In early May, the federal government produced its Third National Climate Assessment. More than 300 experts contributed to the report, which was sponsored by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. It found that effects of climate change, "once considered an issue for a distant future," have moved firmly into the present. "Summers are longer and hotter, and extended periods of unusual heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced.”
The response from House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas)? "This is a political document," he said, "intended to frighten Americans into believing that any abnormal weather we experience is the direct result of human CO2 emissions."
The only Republicans on the committee who are not public skeptics or deniers of the science of climate change are Reps. Steve Palazzo of Mississippi and Chris Collins of New York. Yet both are forceful advocates for drilling and fracking, and both have voted repeatedly to block EPA greenhouse pollution rules. Both declined repeated requests for comment.
Following are the 20 climate-hostile House Science Committee Republicans, in their own words.
Lamar Smith of Texas, Committee Chairman
“We now know that prominent scientists were so determined to advance the idea of human-made global warming that they worked together to hide contradictory temperature data. But for two weeks, none of the networks gave the scandal any coverage on their evening news programs. And when they finally did cover it, their reporting was largely slanted in favor of global warming alarmists.”
— December 8, 2009, House floor speech on “Climategate”
Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma
“Mr. Speaker, global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago. Global temperature changes, when they exist, correlate with Sun output and ocean cycles. During the Medieval Warm Period from 800 to 1300 A.D. – long before cars, power plants, or the Industrial Revolution – temperatures were warmer than today. During the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1900 A.D., temperatures were cooler. Neither of these periods were caused by any human activity.
Even climate change alarmists admit that the number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. and the number of tornado touchdowns have been on a slow decline for over 100 years. But here’s what we absolutely know. We know that Oklahoma will have tornadoes when the cold jet stream meets the warm gulf air. And we also know that this President spends 30 times as much money on global warming research as he does on weather forecasting and warning.
For this gross misallocation, the people of Oklahoma are ready to accept the President’s apology, and I intend to submit legislation to fix this.”
— June 11, 2013, House floor speech on Oklahoma tornadoes
Mo Brooks of Alabama
“I am unconvinced about America’s ability to do anything about Global Warming (assuming Global Warming is man-made and not a recurrent global weather pattern).”
— September 4, 2010, at Left In Alabama, a politics blog
Paul Broun of Georgia, Oversight Subcommittee Chair
“Scientists all over this world say that the idea of human-induced global climate change is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated out of the scientific community. It is a hoax. There is no scientific consensus.”
— June 26, 2009, House floor speech opposing climate legislation
Larry Bucshon of Indiana, Research and Technology Subcommittee Chair
“The data does not support the premise that carbon dioxide emissions are playing a significant role in the world temperature variations. The temperature of the Earth has been changing over centuries with warmer and colder periods throughout history.”
— June 5, 2010, campaign platform opposing climate legislation
Kevin Cramer of North Dakota
“These mandates and these wind farms are all based on this fraudulent science from the EPA, meaning their claim that CO2 is a pollutant and is causing global warming. I’m sure you’re familiar with one of the leading climate research centers in the world there at East Anglia University in England, the Hadley Research Centre. The director, Phil Jones, his emails, he admitted that he was falsifying temperature data. The reason he had to do this is because the data was showing the global climate is actually declining in temperature, temperatures were going down. He was overlaying higher temperatures on the real data to show that it was actually rising. We know the globe is cooling. Number one, we know that. So the idea that CO2 is somehow causing global warming is on its face fraudulent.”
— February 4, 2012, KNOX radio campaign interview
Ralph Hall of Texas, Previous Committee Chairman
“There is growing concern and evidence that scientific data, from which global warming theories emerged, has been manipulated, enhanced or deleted. The IPCC data was used by the EPA as part of the data that went into their endangerment finding. This is especially problematic since the endangerment finding will most likely be used as the basis for a regulatory regime in the U.S.”
— November 11, 2010, House Science Committee hearing on climate science
Randy Hultgren of Illinois
“The greatest impact on our climate clearly is the sun, and we have very little impact on the sun and how much energy and temperature the sun is sending to the earth. We have seen clearly over thousands of years that at different times more energy has come through and different times less energy has come through, and that variation has impacted climate change. Over the thousands of years that’s been recorded we’ve had both colder times and warmer times. It happens to be that we’ve recently come out of a warmer time and now actually we’re headed in to a little bit of a colder time.”
— November 23, 2009, Illinois Review interview
Bill Johnson of Ohio
“Long before Americans were around to blame, there was climate change. Geology tells us that at one time, much of Ohio was covered by ice. At other times, the planet was so warm, that Ohio was under water. These are facts proven throughout the Earth’s history, recorded for the ages in the ground that we live on. Our climate is constantly changing.”
— July 2, 2013, Barnesville Enterprise op-ed by Johnson opposing President Obama’s climate policy
Frank Lucas of Oklahoma
“Most telling of the EPA’s irrational regulatory approach is how the EPA has concluded that the breath that we exhale, the gas that livestock expels, are dangerous pollutants and should be regulated by the Clean Air Act.”
— April 7, 2011, House floor speech opposing EPA greenhouse pollution rules
Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Energy Subcommittee Chair
“There is no disputing that our planet experiences climate change – it has been cycling between cooling and warming periods long before we were here to experience the effects. I believe the jury is still out on whether mankind can alter global climate trends.”
— June 4, 2009, op-ed opposing climate legislation
Thomas Massie of Kentucky
“I would challenge [President Obama] to show us the linkage – the undeniable linkage – between droughts and the change of weather, and some kind of human activity.”
— January 22, 2013, Heritage Foundation “Conversations With Conservatives”
Michael McCaul of Texas
“Whereas recent events have uncovered extensive evidence from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England (in this resolution referred to as the ‘CRU’) which involved many researchers across the globe discussing the destruction, altering, and hiding of data that did not support global warming claims.”
— December 8, 2009, House Resolution 954, regarding the scientific protocols used in climate change research
Randy Neugebauer of Texas
“What we have here is a case of formulating scientific findings that back up policy, instead of creating policy that is backed up by legitimate science. Proponents of man-made global warming in Congress will use every opportunity they have to invite witnesses to testify before Congress who only share their point of view. We now have clear evidence of what we knew all along, that there are perhaps thousands of scientists who don’t share these views, and sadly have been the subject of concerted efforts to discourage and suppress their findings from publication.”
— November 30, 2009, Randy’s Roundup weekly constituent newsletter
Bill Posey of Florida
“If we've had at least three ice ages, and some people, some scientists say five, you cannot have five seamless ice ages. You must warm up between, you know, to have them. The earth has had tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, tectonic plate shifts, meteor strikes, asteroid strikes, for millions of years, and it's not going to stop just because we're here now. When you think back twenty years ago, the worry was global freezing. We're going to freeze again. We're going to have another ice age.”
— December 19, 2011, interview with Tea Party activist Victoria Jackson
Dana Rohrabacher of California
“Too often, when Congress is asked to pass environmental legislation, the legislation is based on emotional junk science rather than data based on reproducible, rigorous, tested, peer-reviewed results. In no area has this been more obvious than climate change. Because the Kyoto Treaty and much of the suggested environmental legislation would decimate jobs in southern California, constituents may be interested to learn of the growing scientific consensus that global warming is not manmade, if it is in fact even occurring.”
— March 18, 2009, House floor speech on global warming
David Schweikert of Arizona, Environment Subcommittee Chair
“When you think about the complexity of a worldwide system and the amount of data you’d have to capture, and how you adjust for a sunspot, and how you adjust for a hurricane and I think it’s incredibly arrogant for the Al Gores of the world to stand up and say the world is coming to an end.”
— June 16, 2010, interview with conservative activist Marcus Kelley
Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin
“For months, legitimate questions have been raised about global warming data not being verified and conflicting data being suppressed, better known to some as ‘Climategate.’”
— February 12, 2010, weekly column
Steve Stockman of Texas
"Global cooling" (70s) -> "Greenhouse effect" (80s) -> "Global warming" (90s) -> "Climate change" (00s) -> Record cold temps (10s)
— January 25, 2014, Stockman's Twitter feed
Randy Weber of Texas
“I may want to get your cell phone, because if we go through cycles of global warming and then back to global cooling, I need to know when to buy my long coat on sale. I just don't know how y'all prove those hypotheses going back fifty, hundred, what you might say is thousands if not millions of years, and then postulate those forward.”
— March 26, 2014, Science Committee hearing with White House science advisor John Holdren
This story was supported by The American Independent Institute.