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Senator touts document saying 'there is no climate emergency'
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) entered the disputed statement into the official record of a Senate hearing and urged less climate spending.
CLIMATEWIRE | A Republican lawmaker amplified the voices of climate change skeptics at a congressional hearing Wednesday, using a disputed document to question the need for spending billions to reduce carbon emissions.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) held up a brief statement known as the “World Climate Declaration” as evidence that the pace of global warming does not justify the amount of money being spent by the Biden administration and other nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The statement, which says “there is no climate emergency” and has been signed by over 1,800 scientists and professionals from around the world, was entered into the official record of the Senate Budget Committee hearing on how climate change threatens supply chains.
But climate experts, including a witness at the hearing Wednesday, have sharply disputed the conclusions and noted that many of the signatories are engineers and physicists without climate expertise.
“Physicists aren’t climatologists. I could cite 18,000 scientists who would say climate change is a serious problem,” Adam Rose, a University of Southern California professor of public policy and environmental economics, told senators.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said that in his state “the increase in the fire season is very, very real. We've had six towns burned to the ground. That never happened in the past.”
“The droughts are real. Our farmers are being hurt by massive impact on the reduced rainfall. They're getting less water from the snowpack,” Merkley added.
Johnson has long questioned the need for quick action to address the consequences of global warming such as intensified disasters and increased heat waves.
"I'm not a climate change denier. I'm just not an alarmist." Johnson said.
Johnson read from the declaration including a statement that carbon dioxide “is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth. More CO2 is favorable for nature, greening our planet.”
“I love this,” Johnson said as he read.
Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) warned that the U.S. is “going to borrow and spend ourselves into a place it'll be a lot worse than where the economy might go — supply chain and all that — due to climate.”
The declaration, led by two Nobel-Prize-winning physicists, cites climate disinformation largely refuted by climate experts. It says that recent global warming results from natural conditions, is occurring much more slowly than models have predicted and does not increase the frequency or strength of natural disasters.
“That’s just a statement of desperation,” Rose said in an interview after the hearing. “I can't imagine there's any agronomist worth their salt who would have signed on with that kind of statement.”
“Just because a person’s a Nobel Prize winner in physics doesn’t mean he’s an expert on climate change,” Rose added.
Climate scientists have near-unanimous agreement that climate change is resulting from human activities and is an increasing danger to civilization. A 2021 study that analyzed 88,125 peer-reviewed studies on climate change found that 99.9 percent of the papers blamed human activities for global warming.
“Compare that document to the last 40 years of climate change research,” Michael Khoo, a climate disinformation consultant to Friends of the Earth, said in a phone interview after the hearing. “Climate change is the most proven scientific concept in history.”
The assertion that carbon dioxide is good for vegetation growth does not hold up because the Earth has enough CO2 in the air for plants, Rose said during the interview.
This story also appears in E&E Daily.
