NASA nominee is a hack; Jeff Flake is a bitch

Politics & Elections
21

If that’s how you read that, you read it wrong. He begins with the standard denialist mantra “…the climate is changing. It has always changed.” That’s straight out of the denialist playbook, and so is the implication that, sure, we ought to continue studying the human influence (if any) because we know so little about it. That’s just willful denial of the extraordinarily rapid rate of climate change in modern times – orders of magnitude in excess of what occurs naturally, and its unequivocal association with the huge spike in anthropogenic CO2. And the icing on the cake is his blatant lie about space-based assets not agreeing with terrestrial data on climate change, a shameless attempt to cast further aspersions on the science. This is about as blatant a case of denial as it’s possible to publicly express while still trying to retain some plausible deniability.

Bridenstine is in the tradition of a string of Oklahoma Republicans who are blatant climate change deniers, the king of them all being his predecessor as an Oklahoma congressman and now senator, James Inhofe, the idiot who brought a snowball into Congress to prove that climate change isn’t happening. In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter how you try to spin it: as per the above link, Bridenstine plainly said “global warming should not drive national energy policy without clearer evidence” and this intransigence is what truly matters when judging a political operative and his position on policy. To people like Bridenstine, there will never be enough evidence, and there will never be action on climate change. And that’s why your efforts to spin this with semantic wordplay are pointless and meaningless.

Yeah, about the statement that “If you look at the Chinese and the Russian and the Indian production of carbon emissions, it is overwhelmingly massive compared to the carbon footprint of the United States of America. If we unilaterally damage our economy while they continue to grow …”? This is blatantly false on several levels. It makes it sound like the US emissions footprint is insignificant. It’s the second largest in the world, and by far the largest per capita. Only China emits more. US emissions are far larger than all of the EU combined, and more than twice that of India or Russia.

So it’s a totally incorrect, blatant attempt to deceive, and moreover, no one has ever suggested that the US should act unilaterally. That’s what the Paris climate accord was all about: everyone doing their bit. The only country on earth that pulled out of the accord was the US, due to the unilateral action of the same moron who’s now appointing Bridenstine to NASA.

This is a serious problem not only because of all the climate monitoring that NASA does, but because they are an important agency in climate research. Some of the leading figures in climate research have done their work in the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), people like James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt, for example. What kind of funding priority are they going to have under the management of this ignorant denialist dipshit?

22

Sorry, but this is not refuting his words – it’s merely highlighting the fact that others who have used similar words or come from similar sections of the country are denying climate change.

I’m interested in what he, personally, has said, not what others have said from his state or using similar arguments.

I don’t agree it makes it sound like the US footprint is insignificant. I take his words for what they say, not what you’d urge me to read into them.

I agree. As I read it, you’re right: China’s carbon emissions exceed the United States’, but India and Russia do not.

So that would be an example of a false statement on his part.

See? His words.

23

Yeah, I don’t think a former Nazi and head of the German ballistic missile program is who you want running your civilian space agency. von Braun was a hard enough sell, and he never served in the military and only reluctantly joined the Nazi party.

You realize that Bricker is just going to rationalize and make semantic arguments regardless of Bridenstein’s long history of climate change denialism, right? Because for Bricker, the truth doesn’t matter as long as he “wins” the argument.

There are, of course, plenty of capable and experienced people who could serve as NASA Administrator. However, the vast majority of them have no interest in serving at the pleasure of a mercurial, capricious would-be demogogue whose other Cabinet and advisor picks are anti-science and anti-education. So we get Bridenstein, who fits perfectly into the clown car of Trump nominees along with Betsy DeVos, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions, Ben Carson, Scott Pruitt, and the rest of the collection of disingenuous nincompoops running the executive branch.

Stranger

24

Maybe Bridenstine is a climate change denier, but your assertion that he has flatly denied global climate change appears to be false. Whether an assertion is true or false is not semantics. Do you have evidence to support your assertion?

Everything thus far takes the form of, he made argument A, therefore he really means argument B because reasons.

25

Exactly correct. We know what he REALLY means, just like all those of his ilk.

And notice that I don’t argue against a genuine charge: Bridenstine claimed that Russian and Indian emissions were greater than US, and they aren’t. That’s straightforward.

“Flatly denied,” is equally straightforward, and unfortunately it’s straightforward in the other direction.

26

Wouldn’t that be awful? What if we invested hugely in renewable energy that doesn’t involve burning something. And we have a new age of abundant green energy, and then find out we didn’t have to. Wow, what a disaster, huh?

27

I see a lot of poisoning the well with regards to climate change arguments. A lot of people are “predicting” that the next “denier” argument will be that “well, sure, global warming is caused by man, but we shouldn’t do anything if other countries aren’t doing anything.” Which means that if you actually do think that unilateral action is not worth it then they can claim that you are a secret denier.

28

Good reasons IMHO, One of the links Stranger On a Train linked to:

Points at this Scientific American report:

Of course he has said that his position is “evolving” but getting the Support of Trump should tell anyone that he, like Trump, does talk out of both sides of his mouth.

29

Bridenstine is using the same arguments as other notorious climate change deniers because he is one, and those are the arguments they make, not, as you try to imply, as the result of some coincidence or my misinterpretation. Here are the outright fallacies just in those short extracts that you thought were exonerating:

[ul]
[li]He states that the climate is always changing, which in itself is certainly true, but why do denialists constantly make that statement? Very obviously, it’s an attempt to establish the relevancy of past climate changes to modern post-industrial climate change. Any such mention is therefore a deceptive misdirection because natural climate changes occur gradually over tens of thousands or millions of years, not with the suddenness of present changes, which correspond in time and magnitude with the CO2 spike that industrialization produced. There are also occasional short-term climate variations, but these are again different, because they’re not global in scope and rarely of the same magnitude.[/li][/ul]

[ul]
[li]Second, his stupid “rental car” example is an intentional attempt to cast uncertainty on the dominant role of human factors in post-industrial climate change, a doubt that he has explicitly raised on many other occasions. But the dominant role of human factors, principally carbon emissions, has been unequivocally established in thousands of scientific studies, most recently well summarized in the IPCC AR5 Working Group 1 report. This is not a matter of debate or interpretation.[/li][/ul]

[ul]
[li]Third, as you at least partially acknowledged, he tried to understate the significance of US emissions, outright lied about how it compared to other countries, and outright lied when he implied that anyone expects the US to act alone while other countries do nothing. In fact, as I said, it’s the other way around. All major countries are signatories to the Paris climate accord except the US.[/li][/ul]

[ul]
[li]Fourth, not in your cite but in the cite that I provided before, Bridenstine is on record as stating that “global warming should not drive national energy policy without clearer evidence”. The science disagrees, and indeed the leading scientists of the national science bodies of the major nations (in the US, that’s the National Academy of Sciences) have issued several joint statements confirming that the clarity of evidence justifies urgent action on climate. The same conclusions are reached in the recent series of IPCC reports. And of course, that was the whole science-based rationale of the Paris climate accords. Bridenstine is again defying the science, and is again wrong.[/li][/ul]

These quotes from an article in Scientific American pretty much say it all:
… As a freshman lawmaker, Bridenstine demanded an apology from President Obama for wasting money on global warming research. He has also blamed the sun for climate change and denied that carbon emissions are driving up global temperatures.

… Bridenstine said earth science at NASA is often unfairly pitted against planetary science for financial resources. He wrote that the rivalry was “not in the best interest of NASA, the United States or the world.”

I think it’s pretty clear that not only is Bridenstine a flagrant climate change denier, but his hostility to climate science research, particularly at NASA, makes him a particularly odious and dangerous pick for the job of administrator.

What does “flatly denied global climate change” mean today? In an era when climate change is having visible effects on temperature, storm surges, glaciers and Arctic ice, rising sea levels, precipitation and water supplies, and many other aspects of the environment, the denial business has become focused not on the increasingly self-evident reality of climate change, but on deflecting blame away from anthropogenic carbon emissions as the cause, trying to blame natural causes, and trying to discredit or misrepresent the science that conclusively says otherwise. In particular, the objective is to convince their audience that the evidence is not conclusive enough to warrant mitigation policies. That’s the standard denialist agenda, and all those things are exactly what Bridenstine has been doing.

30

That is because even that ignores that it was talked about before too.

It was not a prediction, it was old hat already.

What many that looked at the issue concluded then? That most of the ones proposing that did use it as a very bad excuse or ruse to also do nothing.

Here is Grist noticing that excuse in 2007:

31

That appears to be an argument in favor of unilateral action, rather than a claim that there is no unilateral action.

32

As noted already there are already actions that China, India and others (specially in Europe) are doing, the unilateral action was for the USA to get out of treaties.

33

That’s not going to happen, because acknowledging the scientific conclusions also means accepting the serious consequences of inaction, making that an impossible position to justify. Which is why every major country in the world signed on to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change agreement in Paris in 2015. So, ironically and contrary to Bridenstine’s blather, there’s no such thing any more as unilateral action on climate change, because all countries (except the US, of course) have agreed to the basic mitigation objectives. The only thing you can now do unilaterally is refuse to cooperate with the rest of the world and unilaterally do nothing.

And since the science tells us that this is a foolish and dangerous strategy with dire consequences, any policy of inaction has to be coupled with an element of denial about what the science is telling us, the most convenient form of which is denial of the man-made causes of climate change, and claims that it’s probably some kind of “natural cycle”.

34

There was little action until a couple of years ago. Were people who thought back then that if the US cuts back on emissions that China will simply buy up the cheap oil and burn it “climate change deniers”?

35

Again, if that was the case then you will have a point, but ever since Kyoto that was not the case, the point is now that seeing someone in power telling us that nothing has changed is just telling us about someone that is falling for many of the denier talking points, and showing no leadership whatsoever. It is showing just who they are walking with.

36

I’m not sure what your point is, but if you want a definition, I’d say a practical working definition of “climate change denier” is someone who denies some or all of the fundamental scientific consensus on climate change, namely that (a) the climate is undergoing rapid change, (b) human factors are overwhelmingly the dominant cause, most importantly anthropogenic carbon emissions from fossil fuels, and (c) urgent action is required to mitigate those emissions and stabilize them roughly in accordance with the UNFCCC guidelines, and failure to do this will result in consequences that are primarily negative including major economic costs, loss of life, and reduction in quality of life globally.

Classic denialism used to focus on denying point (a), which was pretty much then the end of the discussion. More recently it’s become more realistic to acknowledge (a) and question (b) and (c). Bridenstine is in that camp, according to his own words.

In view of Bridenstine’s positions on this, particularly the ones that I cited in the previous post, including the quote from Scientific American, I have a couple of questions for his defenders here who feel that he’s being judged unfairly on the climate issue. How would you (the generic “you”) feel if you were one of the many climate scientists working at NASA? How would you feel if you were Gavin Schmidt, a highly respected scientist who runs the climate research program at NASA GISS? How would you feel knowing that your top boss thinks that your work is a “waste of money” (his own words), and that your whole field of study is wrong in its most fundamental conclusions?

I know what I’d do in that situation. I’d be planning my exit, and fast. I can see the consequences of having an ignorant dipshit running the place cascading into a serious morale problem among NASA’s top scientists and engineers. Is this really the kind of guy who should be NASA administrator?

37

I’m rebutting the denialist staircase, which can be used to poison the well such that anyone who thinks that a particular deal is a bad one for America can be accused of denialism. It’s possible to think that any particular course of action by any one nation will not significantly impact climate change, while still holding the opinion that the greenhouse gas effect is real and that the world as a whole needs to act to mitigate the upcoming catastrophe. The proper way to counter these claims is not to call them deniers but to rebut their facts about the agreement, and to a lesser extent, call them Trump appointees who should not be trusted about anything.

38

Actually, things like that show that items like the old, old, excuse of not doing anything because others will not do the same, had replies already made to, and many times before.

Good to see that wolfpup and I linked to cites that did that already, the rebuttals to their mistaken notions about past agreements or lack of them were already made.

39

It was Stranger’s phrasing, so perhaps he could clarify. Without clarification I take the phrase to be something akin to an outright denial that climate change is happening at all. The Scientific American quotewould be sufficient for me, if accurate:

It’s not exactly sourced or quoted, but the Scientific American is a pretty reputable source except this article is a reprint from eenews.net which I’m not familiar with. I’d like to see what they base that on.

40

I have to add too that the missed point is that we should already be onto discussions to how to take care of the issue, even with free enterprise solutions guided by the government.

Seeing those tired denier or do-nothing talking points gish-galloped still today by the likes of Bridenstine, shows yet again that Trump does not know who the best people are for an important job. And seeing their votes, one has to say that most Republicans in congress do not care about the ugly things that they are filling the swamp with.