Today, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology held a heated hearing on the “assumptions, policy implications, and the scientific method” of climate science. In fact, the hearing was just an excuse to pretend there’s uncertainty within the scientific community on whether human-made climate change is real.
Four witnesses were asked to testify before the committee; only one of them — Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University — agreed with the other 97 percent of scientists who believe that human activity, like the burning of fossil fuels, is causing our planet to heat up. The other witnesses testified that we don’t really know how much people are contributing to climate change, and there’s too much uncertainty to consider global warming a threat.
“For a balanced panel, we need 96 more Dr. Manns.”
“The witness panel does not really represent the vast majority of climate scientists who have concluded that there is a connection between human activity and climate,” Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) said at the hearing. “For a balanced panel, we need 96 more Dr. Manns.”
In fact, Mann’s views aren’t only representative of pretty much the entire science community; they also represent the views of the majority of Americans. Data released last week by the Yale Program on Climate Communication shows that 70 percent of Americans believe that climate change is happening; 53 percent believe that global warming is caused mostly by human activities. And 75 percent want the US government to regulate heat-trapping carbon dioxide as a pollutant. (More than 70 percent of Americans also trust climate scientists on global warming.)