By H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.
Under normal circumstances, we should welcome the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) engaging in an honest assessment of the state of the climate, the effects of greenhouse gases on it, and what potential impacts might realistically be expected to occur.
Unfortunately, based on the timing of the NAS’s decision to produce such a report, the short time frame it gave itself to form a committee and produce a supposedly comprehensive assessment covering 16 years of research, and the make-up of the committee itself, one can likely conclude it was solely a political exercise. An effort to undermine the recent Department of Energy report and to derail the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to rescind its endangerment finding.
Indeed, the NAS report ignores fundamental science entirely, never seriously considering the causes of the present climate change, or whether human actions are causing a climate catastrophe.
The language of the proposal, the makeup of the committee, and the speed with which it was produced did not instill confidence that it would be an unbiased, “balanced” assessment, and it wasn’t. The NAS report states, “[t]he study will develop conclusions that describe supporting evidence.” An objective examination would have been framed more neutrally.
According to the NAS, members of the committee producing the report “contain the requisite expertise to address its task and whether the points of views of individual members are adequately balanced such that the committee as a whole can address its charge objectively.”
Yet, there was little expertise in climate science itself, and no balance at all. Instead, the vast bulk of the members demonstrate through their writings and public statements that they are predisposed to linking increasing atmospheric CO2 to purported, catastrophic climate change.
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Let’s start with the committee chair. The NAS eschewed choosing a prominent physicist, like NAS members Richard Lindzen, Will Happer, or Steve Koonin, to chair the committee. Rather, it appointed Shirley M. Tilghman, a professor of molecular biology, to assess climate change. While Tilghman may well be qualified to assess the potential phenotypic and genetic impacts of climate change on biological organisms, she lacks specialized knowledge concerning the causes of climate change, either ongoing changes in the present, or climate changes in the past.
Of course, the choice was not accidental. Tilghman has shown herself to be firmly within the Consensus Science community who believe that humans are causing dangerous climate change.
“I needn’t tell this audience that in the last 50 years we have experienced an unprecedented rise in CO2 levels in the environment, leading to a rise in global sea levels of 17 cm, and temperature increases on land and in the oceans,” Tilghman stated in a 2015 lecture to the Royal College of Physicians of London, ‘Laying the Foundations for 21st Century Scientific Progress.’
She then proceeded to misstate the state of the climate across a broad array of features stating: “[t]he impact of these changes in the atmosphere are far-ranging and threaten human health and well-being in many ways, through more extreme fluctuations in weather, decreased air and water quality, declines in agriculture productivity, damage to fragile ecosystems – coral reefs in the oceans and Arctic habitats in the tundra – and ultimately the loss of coastal cities.”
How can someone who real-world data shows is so wrong about the current state of agricultural productivity – its improving due to climate change – the lack of measurable changes in extreme weather, and the lack of a discernable climate impact on coral reefs and coastal cities be selected to head this committee, unless the goal was to promote a predetermined conclusion that humans are causing dangerous climate change, rather than to objectively seek the truth?
The remaining committee members are no better.
David T. Allen, Ph.D., Susan Anenberg, Ph.D., Michele Barry, M.D., Charles T. Driscoll, Jr., Ph.D., Chris T. Hendrickson, Ph.D., Marika Holland, Ph.D., George M. Hornberger, Rear Admiral David W. Titley, USN (Retired), each either is a member of, work with or for, or lead, climate activist organizations or university centers and departments specifically founded on the assumption that humans are causing dangerous climate change, the effects of which must be detected or teased out both to assign blame and develop responses.
These centers and groups have received millions of dollars in grants, contracts, and donations predicated on the assumption that climate change is dangerous and must be halted based on solutions or policies developed by their centers or organizations. If climate change isn’t producing or seriously threatening catastrophic consequences, their respective reputations and livelihoods would be discredited and defunded.
As such, it was unsurprising that the report they supposedly wrote in the unbelievably short time of just a few days after having been confirmed in their position lacked even a whiff of objectivity.
The NAS report did not address admitted weaknesses in climate models, the biases inherent in ground-level temperature measurements, or acknowledge that climate change, and any policies implemented to mitigate it, have and will continue to result in costs and unintended consequences.
Instead, the report, as with the climate modelling itself, was nothing more than another exercise in GIGO, Garbage In, Garbage Out, in pursuit of progressive or liberal political ends.
The NAS has become a highly politicized organization, and as a result, its reports should be viewed extremely skeptically.
This is bad for the pursuit of knowledge, trust in science, and for contemporary politics because it is difficult to shape sound public policies founded on an accurate understanding of the state of the world when the views being presented are explicitly driven by the progressive political agenda of expanding government power.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., ([email protected]) is the director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research organization.
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