Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking yesterday at an event hosted by the Atlantic Council, criticized Florida Governor Rick Scott’s (R) administration for allegedly banning the term climate change from all communications. Scott has publicly denied claims that any phrases were forbidden by his administration.
Kerry said, “Now folks, we literally do not have the time to waste debating whether we can say ‘climate change.’ Because no matter how much people want to bury their heads in the sand, it will not alter the fact that 97 percent of peer-reviewed climate studies confirm that climate change is happening and that human activity is largely responsible.”
But according to an article first published in the Wall Street Journal on May 27, 2014, “The ’97 percent’ figure in the Zimmerman/Doran survey represents the views of only 79 respondents who listed climate science as an area of expertise and said they published more than half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change. Seventy-nine scientists—of the 3,146 who responded to the survey—does not a consensus make.”
“In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Mr. Cook reported that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.
“Mr. Cook’s work was quickly debunked. In Science and Education in August 2013, for example, Professor David R. Legates and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found ‘only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse’ the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming.” You can access the full article here.
Kerry has previously stated that climate change is as “big a threat as terrorism, poverty, and weapons of mass destruction,” and has been considered by some to be a “champion of combating climate change.”
Kerry’s remarks are part of a growing trend among Democrats in the run-up to the 2016 elections to silence climate change scientists and members of Congress who are skeptical of global warming. There is also a new climate change denier website where citizens are urged to contact and harass Senators and House Representatives who don’t follow the climate change narrative.
The actual host for the site is Organizing for America, a group with close ties to the White House, and who have contributed heavily to Democratic priorities in order “to mobilize support behind the president’s agenda.”
According to Kerry, politicians who don’t follow the global warming narrative, “will not be remembered favorably by future generations.” He also said:
“If we fail, future generations will not and should not forgive those who ignore this moment, no matter their reasoning. Future generations will judge our effort not just as a policy failure, but as a collective moral failure of historic consequence. And they will want to know how world leaders could possibly have been so blind or so ignorant or so ideological or so dysfunctional and, frankly, so stubborn.”
Mimicking Obama’s recent comments about the Keystone Pipeline carrying “dirty oil,” Kerry urged the country to transition away from “dirty sources of energy.” The Keystone XL pipeline, which needs the State Department’s approval to be built across international borders, awaits Kerry’s decision.
Once made, its ultimate fate resides with the President, who vetoed bipartisan legislation on February 24, 2015, that would have begun construction of the pipeline.
Kerry also commended Obama’s “Climate Action Plan” for lowering carbon dioxide emissions, which the Daily Caller noted as “praise that may be misplaced.”
“Government data shows that U.S. emissions began to fall in 2007,” and Obama’s Climate Plan wasn’t announced until summer 2013.
