Pruitt Earns A Failing Grade When It Comes To Climate Science

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said on CNBC: “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.” This is consistent with Pruitt’s previous public statements and writings on climate change. It is also false and misleading. There is not “tremendous disagreement” among scientists but a strong consensus that humans are the primary cause of recent climate change. The consensus exists because of clear and convincing evidence from empirical observations of temperatures and many different Earth systems, fundamental and tested laws of physics and insights gained from model simulations of how the climate behaves under changed conditions. Nearly 30 years of review of the evidence by a variety of scientific organizations have led the non-partisan U.S. National Academy of Sciences, as well as many other national science academies and scientific associations, to conclude that the climate is changing and humans very likely are the major cause. The most comprehensive and carefully peer-reviewed assessment of the science of climate change is conducted every five to six years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC’s most recent assessment of the physical science of climate change, published in 2013, was written...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news