Post summarizing Monday's climate briefing.

Congressional Climate Briefing - The End of Climate Skepticism?

Dana, I'm surprised you didn't link to your advanced rebuttal of "it's the sun" in this paragraph. You're losing your touch, old man :-)

Bah, did you see how many links I jammed in there? :-)

Fixed the typo and added links to 'it's the sun' and 'it's internal variability'.

Dr. Muller is expressing "skepticism" about subjects which he has not personally researched.  However, other scientists, like Dr. Santer, have.

That second sentence jarred for me. The meaning might not be immediately clear to people who are not familar with Santer.

Otherwise, good.

Hi Dana,

I pretty much liked what they all had to say in their closing 1 minutes take-home messages. I downloaded the vid file, but my Mac won;t play it for some reason...aaargh!  But the post is long already.  Then again, maybe all the more reason to summarize in bullet for or in a box some of their key, take-home-messages, a couple of one liners.

Pity Santer did not submit "evidence" that you could link to.

"Unfortunately, the fact that it was attended by zero Republican congressmen suggests that contrary to the hearing subtitle, it will not be the end of climate skepticism"

To be fair, where were the other Democrats!?

To be fair: In case you hadn't noticed, both Europe and the US are in the midst of fiscal/monetary meltdowns.

They might be slightly pre-occupied.

Oh that reminds me, I meant to make the point that jobs and the economy are hardly the only issues being addressed in Congress these days.  Like a few weeks ago, Republicans decided to spend time reaffirming the USA's official motto "In God We Trust."  If they have time for that, I think they should be able to make time for an hour-long climate hearing.

Here we go.  Plus Obama mocking them for this gimmick, and also noting they've made the time to debate minting a commemorative coin for Major League Baseball. 

Off topic, but following from Dana's last comment, Congress finds time to allow anyone who has a concealed arms permit from one state to carry weapons in another. Here So much for State's rights.

Andy,

If that ever passes, I bet it will prove unConstitutional.

I sure hope so neal, but that's another good example of what I'm talking about.  Republicans claim they're too busy with jobs and the economy to talk about the climate, yet they manage to find time for all this BS.  Is making it easier for people to carry concealed weapons into states that don't want to allow them really more important than learning about climate change?

From the point of view of priorities: It activates the GOP social-conservative note.

But it effectively imposes one state's laws on another state: That's got to be unConstitutional.

Post updated to include a discussion of the time-wasters, and a brief summary of each presentation's key points at the end.

I'm going to publish this in the morning and send it off to TreeHugger, so get any last comments in if you've got 'em.

Nicely done!

Excellent, yet again!