If the science of climate change really is "established", as popular media insist, what's wrong with cutting federal spending on climate research, as President Donald Trump's budget proposes to do?
And if what Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt told a journalist Mar. 9 truly is "at odds with an overwhelming body of scientific evidence showing that humans are causing the climate to warm by releasing CO2 into the atmosphere," as National Public Radio averred on its web site, why buy more evidence?
"Do you believe that it's been proven that CO2 is the primary control knob for climate?" CNBC's Joe Kernen asked Pruitt.
The EPA chief responded: "I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no, I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don't know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis."
Kernen asked a good question. Pruitt answered correctly but elaborated clumsily.
News coverage, like NPR's, focused on the "primary contributor" part of his response. Fact-checkers eagerly noted that CO2 from human activity probably accounts for most warming observed since World War II.
But Kernen didn't ask if CO2 is a greenhouse gas. He asked, metaphorically, if people can lower global average temperature by limiting emissions of the gas as though adjusting an oven.
That's an important distinction. Typically, most reporters ignored it.
Correlation is imperfect between CO2 levels and measured temperature. The climate has other variables and feedbacks still poorly understood.
And CO2 is not the "primary" contributor to observed warming. Water vapor is.
On the basics of climate change, Pruitt technically was more right than wrong. He certainly was right about the need for more debate and analysis.
But can politicized federal agencies credibly sponsor climate research still much in order? Trump's budget emphatically says no.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted Mar. 17, 2017; author's e-mail: [email protected])
