Testimony on Climate Change and Science

We'll start with you,

Dr. Denny, and thank you for being here, from the great

University of Oklahoma. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, and distinguished guests,

thank you for inviting me to testify today.

I am a geologist and geophysicist.

I have a bachelor's degree in geology from Indiana University and a Ph D.

in geophysics from the University of Utah.

My field of specialization in geophysics is temperature and heat flow.

In recent years, I have turned my studies to the history and philosophy of science.

In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science.

In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of

about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years.

The week the article appeared,

I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio.

He offered to interview me,

but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity.

When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.

I had another interesting

experience around the time my paper in Science was published.

I received an astonishing email

from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said,

ìWe have to get rid of the medieval warm period î

The medieval warm period was a time of unusually warm weather that began

around 1000 A D.

and persisted until a cold period known as

the Little Ice Age took hold in the 14th century.

Warmer climate brought a remarkable flowering of prosperity,

knowledge, and art to Europe during the high Middle Ages.

The existence of the medieval warm period

had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades, but now it was a

major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th

century warming was truly anomalous.

It had to ìbe gotten rid ofî.

In 1769, Joseph Priestley warned that scientists overly attached to a favored

hypothesis would not hesitate

to warp the whole course of nature.

In 1999, Michael Mann and his colleagues

published a reconstruction of past temperature in which the medieval warm period

simply vanished.

This unique estimate became known as

the ìHockey Stickî because of the shape of the temperature graph.

Normally in science,

when you have a novel result that appears to overturn previous work,

you have to demonstrate why the earlier work was wrong.

But the work of Mann

and his colleagues was initially accepted uncritically, even though it

contradicted the results of more than 100 previous studies.

Other researchers have since reaffirmed that the

medieval warm period was both warm and global in its extent.

There is an overwhelming bias today in the media regarding the

issue of global warming.

In the past two years, this bias has bloomed into an irrational hysteria.

Every natural disaster that occurs

is now linked with global warming,

no matter how tenuous or impossible the connection.

As a result, the

public has become vastly misinformed on this and other environmental issues.

Earthís climate system is complex and poorly understood,

but we do know that throughout human history,

warmer temperatures have been associated with

more stable climates and increased human health and prosperity.

Colder temperatures have been

correlated with climatic instability,

famine, and increased human mortality.

The amount of

climatic warming that has taken place in the past 150 years is poorly constrained

and its cause, human or natural, is unknown.

There is no sound

scientific basis for predicting future climate change with any degree of certainty.

If the climate does warm,

it is likely to be beneficial to humanity rather than harmful.

In my opinion, it would be foolish to establish national energy policy on the basis

of misinformation and irrational hysteria. Thank you.

He said, ìWe have to get rid of the medieval warm period

î There are 787 scientists

from 462 institutions in 42 countries over the last 20 years who have contributed

to papers establishing that medieval warm period was real, was global,

and was warmer than the present, and yet the UN

says that there wasnít a medieval warm period.

That is the scientific consensus.

If you do science by consensus, which the UN says it does,

but on the question of the to accept the scientific consensus.

Instead, it uses made up graphs.

And by the way, another example of

the cover up is if you go to the IPCC web page,

you cannot access the first and second reports anymore. Theyíre gone.