Senate Climate Skeptic Hearing in Washington D.C.

Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, invited climate change skeptics to testify at a Senate hearing that he says aims to shed light on the “facts and evidence” of climate change science. Cruz, chairman of the Commerce Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness scheduled the hearing: “Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Earth’s Climate.” Like most of his fellow Republican presidential candidates, the Texas senator rejects the view of some 97 percent of climate scientists, as documented by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, that there is a link between human activity such as burning fossil fuels and climate change. Cruz labelled that figure “bogus” in an early October hearing and characterised attempts to act on climate change as a liberal ploy to justify environmental regulations that he said harm the economy. The four witnesses scheduled to appear at the hearing are all prominent climate change skeptics. They are John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville; Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology; William Happer of Princeton University (where Cruz obtained his undergraduate degree); and Mark Steyn, a conservative writer and political commentator. Posing as representatives of oil and coal companies, reporters from Greenpeace UK asked academics from Princeton and Penn State to write papers promoting the benefits of CO2 and the use of coal in developing countries. Happer agreed to write a report for a Middle Eastern oil company on the benefits of CO2 and to allow the firm to keep the source of the funding secret.