Climate Contrarians Seek Leadership of House Science Committee

An article at Ars examines three members of the U.S. House of Representatives who are seeking chairmanship of its Committee on Space, Science, and Technology. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) said in an interview, "My analysis is that in the global warming debate, we won. There were a lot of scientists who were just going along with the flow on the idea that mankind was causing a change in the world's climate. I think that after 10 years of debate, we can show that that there are hundreds if not thousands of scientists who have come over to being skeptics, and I don't know anyone [who was a skeptic] who became a believer in global warming." James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) has a similar record of opposing climate change, as does Lamar Smith (R-TX). Relatedly, Phil Plait, a.k.a. The Bad Astronomer, has posted an article highlighting how U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), a member of the Senate's Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, has declined to answer a question about how old the Earth is, calling it "one of the great mysteries."

Comments

Re:My two cents...

[Troed]

At all other times in the planet's history when there have been periods of warming, it's taken orders of magnitude longer than the current period.

No.

http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html

How do we know? Ice cores.

No.

http://www.climate.unibe.ch/~stocker/papers/bereiter09grl.pdf