Sen.Sessions-EPA Head Can't Answer Basic Climate Questions (Next Time Invite Me To Testify)

I am not a client scientist and global warming enthusiast enjoy pointing that out whenever they try to skewer a post which calls into question their precious climate change hypothesis. But now I can respond that I know facts about climate change off the top of my head that EPA Director Gina McCarthy doesn't know.

Alabama's Sen. Jeff Sessions and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy discussed some climate  change facts during yesterday's Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing. Session asked McCarthy about droughts, hurricanes and the figures used to show climate change and the EPA head was clueless.

Sessions:  Let me ask you this. There was an article from Mr. [Bjorn] Lomborg … from the Copenhagen Institute. He says, along with Dr. Pielke from Colorado, that we’ve had fewer droughts in recent years. Do you dispute that?”

McCarthy: “I don’t know in what context he’s making statements like that, but I can certainly tell you about the droughts are happening today.”

Sessions: “I’m asking you what what other data you know about … world-wide data about whether we are having fewer or less droughts?”

McCarthy: “I’d be happy to provide it, but I certainly am aware that droughts are becoming more extreme and frequent.”

Sessions: “Are you aware that the IPCC has found that moisture content of the soil is, if anything, slightly greater than it has been over the last decade. It’s in their report, are you aware of that?

McCarthy: “I don’t know what you’re referring to, senator, but I’m happy to respond …”

Sessions: “Well you need to know because you’re asking this economy to sustain tremendous costs and you don’t know whether the soil worldwide is more moist or less moist.” 

Here's what McCarthy supposedly didn't know about :

"It is misleading and just plain incorrect to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally,” Professor Roger Pielke Jr. said in his testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

In May of 2014 Professor Pielke published a graph that shows the intensity of the planet's droughts from 1982 to 2012. The graph shows that neither droughts nor their intensity have seen a growth trend during that 30-year period.

Seems pretty clear cut to me even though I am not an expert like the head of the EPA.

Sessions pressed McCarthy on hurricanes something the warming enthusiasts love to talk about.

Sessions: “What about hurricanes. Have we had more or less hurricanes in the last decade?”

McCarthy: “In terms of landing those hurricanes on land, I cannot answer that question. It’s a very complicated issue.”

Sessions: “It’s not complicated on how many have landed. We’ve had a dramatic reduction in the number. We’ve gone a decade without a hurricane [Category] 3 or above.

A study published in the July 2012 Journal of the American Meteorological Society concluded unequivocally there is no trend of stronger or more frequent storms, asserting:

We have identified considerable inter-annual variability in the frequency of global hurricane landfalls, but within the resolution of the available data, our evidence does not support the presence of significant long-period global or individual basin linear trends for minor, major, or total hurricanes within the period(s) covered by the available quality data.

 And then there is the veracity of climate models.

Sessions: Would you acknowledge that over the last 18 years, that the increase in temperature has been very little, and that it is well below, matter of fact 90 percent below most of the environmental models that showed how fast temperature would increase?”

McCarthy: “I do not know what the models actually are predicting that you are referring to …”

Sessions: “This is a stunning development, that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency — who should know more than anybody else in the world, who is imposing hundreds of billions of dollars in cost to prevent this climate temperature increase — doesn’t know whether their projections have been right or wrong.”

There is plenty of information about the climate models for example a recent study reported that climate models have over-stated the last 55 years of global warming. Some scientists have even suggested that climate models are worthless.

So it's obvious that I know more about the climate than the EPA head.  Senator Sessions, next time you want to have a hearing, invite me--I have the information you are looking for---the EPA's McCarthy knows nothing (but if you invite me I expect cookies).

Watch the full exchange on the video below (H/T AL.com)