Rep. [crscore]Steve King[/crscore] called out scientists Monday, telling CNN many of the climatologists who support the Paris agreement have financial backing from the federal government.
“I think the scientists that have been pushing this have collected a lot of money from donors in government and created a science that’s awfully hard to sustain,” King says on CNN’s “New Day.”
The Hawkeye State Republican says he is “very skeptical” of the agreement signed by the U.S. earlier this week. The agreement, in part, seeks to limit the global rise of temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
He also torched the Obama administration for side-stepping Congress in the implementation of the deal. “If you can’t convince the United States Congress, probably it’s not a good idea,” the Iowa Republican says.
King is not alone in his criticism of federal funding’s undue influence on climate research.
Republican presidential candidate Sen. [crscore]Ted Cruz[/crscore] called in several climate change skeptics and scientists to speak last week at his Senate subcommittee hearing on climate change, including John Christy, a climate scientist and professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Christy told the subcommittee panel he believes the attempt to study climate change objectively is thwarted by the federal funding process.
Christy, a well-known climate change skeptic, suggests Congress can fix the problem by directly funding independent “red team” programs. These programs, Christy says, would not be part of the “climate model and industry that tests the basis for the claims that human-induced climate change is dangerous.”
“Funding for many issues like climate change probably wouldn’t materialize in the private sector,” Christy notes in an email to The Daily Caller News Foundation, adding that since “we are where we are, I think for climate science the only way to do this is for congress to directly appropriate money for studies such as mentioned in [my testimony].”
Other global warming skeptics are not convinced of the merits of the “red team” idea proposed by Christy. In April, climatologist Patrick J. Michaels published a study at the Cato Institute showing federal funding of climate science research inevitably results in induced biases.
In an interview with TheDCNF, Michaels dismisses Christy’s “Red Team” idea, saying it would never work because climate change activism is already deeply ensconced in the halls of academia. Climate scientists who upset the applecart are summarily dismissed.
In effect, he concludes, “The blue team (climate change scientists) is always going to win, because the reigning paradigm is one of climate gloom and doom.”
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