Ryan On Climate: "Classic Denialist Dogma" Reports U Chicago Climatologist Ray Pierrehumbert
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With his pick of Ryan, who will address the Republican National Convention tonight, Romney has declared himself to be firmly behind the notion that we can go on burning fossil fuels forever without running out or damaging the climate.
The most explicit statement of Ryan’s climate change views appears in this 2009 op-ed, and since he still features it on his official website, we can take it as an indication of his beliefs. And what a litany of classic denialist dogma it is. He starts off with a cheap shot by implying that Wisconsin residents ought to have a hard time believing that global warming is a problem because they still had to shovel snow in the winter of 2009. Of course, it is absurd to think that any one winter says anything about global warming, still less to think that continued existence or even increase of snowfall is in any way incompatible with overall warming. If Ryan wanted to keep things local, he would have done better to talk to ice fishermen on the Wisconsin lakes, who have seen a dramatic decrease in the duration of ice cover over the past decades.
In this op-ed, Ryan reveals a number of still more alarming beliefs, notably that emails stolen from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit (aka Climategate) show that "leading climatologists make clear efforts to use statistical tricks to distort their findings and intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change," and reveal "a perversion of the scientific method, where data were manipulated to support a predetermined conclusion." … In fact, the hack was a manufactured controversy, and the real victims were the scientists whose emails were stolen. All have been exonerated completely by numerous independent panels, to say nothing of the fact that the key finding of the Climate Research Unit regarding the global temperature increase has been independently reproduced by the project of now-former-skeptic Richard Muller, who even received Koch funding for his study.
Elsewhere, Ryan wrote that "there is growing disagreement among scientists about climate change and its causes," which is manifestly not true (see here and here) at least in the reality-based community where one counts only those with real scientific credentials and a track record of having done serious research in the subject. In that article, though, Ryan's statement is tangential to his main beef, which is his belief that cap and trade will cost money and hurt the economy. Like so much of Ryan's economic policy, this belief is based on voodoo economics which counts costs but ignores all benefits—in this case ignoring the harm done by climate change, and the money saved by using energy more efficiently, and the value of health benefits from the concomitant reduction in conventional air pollution. …
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http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2012/08/31/climate-scientist-ray-pierrehumbert-paul-ryan-is-a-climate-change-denialist/
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