Energy

Did WaPo Admit Scott Pruitt Was Correct On Climate Uncertainty?

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Chris White Tech Reporter
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The Washington Post apparently agrees with President Donald Trump’s EPA chief’s assertion that it’s nearly impossible to determine if carbon emissions are driving climate change.

Scott Pruitt’s recent comments suggesting carbon emissions might not be driving climate change is proof enough that the former Oklahoma AG is a “climate denier,” WaPo wrote in an editorial Friday. The paper’s editorial board also accidentally agreed with one of Pruitt’s claims, namely that it is difficult to determine what is causing so-called man-made global warming.

“Scientists cannot say exactly how much warming will occur after a given amount of carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere — and probably will not be able to until after the warming has occurred,” WaPo wrote.

The paper’s editorial staff hedged its comments, however, telling its audience that there is enough evidence showing greenhouse-gas emissions play a role in climate change – in effect, the debate over global warming is over, according to the paper, even though scientists continue researching how and why the climate changes.

His comments prompted calls for Pruitt to resign for supposedly misleading Congress about his beliefs on global warming.

Activists railed against the EPA administrator, suggesting Pruitt had hoodwinked Congress. Yet, he has consistently argued there is ongoing scientific debate about the extent to which man-made greenhouse gas emissions impact the climate.

“It gets cooler, it gets hotter. We don’t know the trajectory, if it is on an unsustainable course,” Pruitt told CNN in 2016 prior to becoming Trump’s EPA chief. “Nor do we know the extent by which the burning of fossil fuels, man’s contribution to that, is making this far worse than it is.”

The Post, for its part, used recent research from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to dispel Pruitt’s assessment.

“The planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century,” NOAA concluded, leading researchers to believe the change was “driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.”

Climate scientists have gone on the record arguing that NOAA fabricated a lot of data in a landmark 2015 study to hype up temperature increases.

Dr. John Bates, a former principal scientist at the National Climatic Data Center in North Carolina, for instance, told reporters in February that the agency’s study was meant “to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.”

He said NOAA scientists monkeyed with data “to intensify the impact” of global warming.

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