This morning at 10:00, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing for the full committee “to receive testimony on policy options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” There are 23 members of the Committee. 15 minutes into the meeting, this is what the committee room looked like:
At that time, there were only four senators in attendance: Jeff Bingaman, Jim Bunning, Byron Dorgan and Lisa Murkowski. 15 minutes later, Byron Dorgan had excused himself. Senator Bingaman had a bad cold and left the hearing about 45 minutes in. After asking the witnesses an oddly non-germane series of questions about Federal Reserve policy, Senator Jim Bunning also left the room with an hour left to the hearing. Senator Bob Corker ambled in nearly an hour into the committee meeting, leaving just two Senators out of the committee of 23 in attendance at the end:
Only one Senator — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — managed to attend the full hearing. The following 18 Senators on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee didn’t bother to show up at all:
Evan Bayh
John Barrasso
Robert Bennett
Sam Brownback
Richard Burr
Maria Cantwell
Tim Johnson
Mary Landrieu
Blanche Lincoln
John McCain
Robert Menendez
James Risch
Bernard Sanders
Jeff Sessions
Jeanne Shaheen
Debbie Stabenow
Mark Udall
Ron Wyden
The next time one of these Senators uses the word “urgent” in connection with global warming specifically or environmental policy in general, ask him or her to explain what was so urgent as to leave a committee meeting on the subject wholly unattended.
I still think global warming is a scam.
You think the globe is not warming?
Are these graphs a scam?
How does anyone have data from 1880?
They had thermometers back then, you know. Records actually go back before 1880 with smaller numbers of weather stations; data is used from 1880 onwards because this marks a date after which a large number of weather stations make consistent observations.
Land: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/ghcn-monthly/source-table1.html
Ocean: http://icoads.noaa.gov/products.html
Jim
Maybe they were using the tree ring hockey charts to estimate the temps in the 1880′s.
Those are the things that the current controversy is about.
qs
I just linked to methodological resources. They’re not tree ring studies. Read the methodological resources to understand the data.
This is the thing that the people hyping the “current controversy” don’t want you to do.
Don’t bother trying to convince ignornant people who refuse to acknowledge the facts. They’ll deny anything that gets in the way of their head-in-the-sand mentality whereby they don’t have to think or change the way they’re living (with respect to consuming resources, carbon footprint, etc.). This applies to their attitude about the environment, war policy, domestic policies, healthcare, education, and on and on. It’s just easier for them to listen to asshats like Rush or Glenn and just repeat this drivel rather than reading anything and discovering the truth for themselves. i contend that at least 50% of Americans fall into this class, thus nothing is changing “progressively.”