The head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is Scott Pruitt, a bizarre human that flat-out denies the science behind climate change. We don’t mean that he merely denies that humans have any influence on the climate – which he does. Pruitt also refutes the basic fact that carbon dioxide warms the atmosphere, which is like a physicist claiming that magnetic forces are powered by unicorn dreams.
He’s made plenty of other climate claims too, all of which have the intellectual rigor of a pineapple. One of them – that satellite data indicates that warming has leveled off in the last few decades – is a common trope of climate deniers. Now, a new paper has been released by researchers in order to directly refute this.
Appearing in the journal Scientific Reports, the study is essentially a reassessment of the satellite data that has tracked the planet’s atmospheric temperature since 1979.
“Satellite temperature measurements do not support the claim of a ‘leveling off of warming’ over the past two decades,” the authors write in their study. “Our results support and strengthen previous findings of a large human-caused contribution to warming.”
The team, led by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, wrote it to specifically take on Pruitt and his wildly erroneous claims – a rather unprecedented move, but one that’s a sign of the times.
Pruitt, an attorney general whose career has been dominated by his attempts to sue the EPA, made the “leveling” claim after a recent Senate confirmation hearing. This is referenced right at the start of this study, and the authors sift through the data once again in order to point out how bogus this notion is.
No serious scientist believes that the troposphere hasn’t warmed significantly in the last few decades. Papers that attempt to refute this fact never make it past peer review. Climate scientists do not have arguments about this.
The fact that this paper even exists boggles the mind.
There have always been plenty of climate change deniers, but now that so many are in powerful government positions, scientists are starting to feel like they have no choice but to speak out. We’re just one step away from researchers explaining in scientific journals why the Earth isn’t flat.
This gives us an idea, though. There are so many claims of breathtaking stupidity out there about climate change that it would be fun to refute them via scientific study.
One of the more hilariously dim examples came courtesy of Republican State Senator Scott Wagner, who recently claimed that climate change is being caused by human body heat – because there’s just so many of us, you know?
Anyone want to do the mathematics on that one? Get in touch!
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