Professional science organizations’ calling on Republican lawmakers to stop questioning climate science is a “a blatant misuse of scientific authority,” according to a prominent climate scientist.
“This statement is a blatant misuse of scientific authority to advocate for specific socioeconomic policies,” Judith Curry, a Georgia Tech climate scientist, wrote of a letter sent by dozens of scientific groups to Congress last week.
Science groups, led by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), sent a letter to Congress reminding lawmakers of the “the consensus scientific view of climate change.”
“This conclusion is based on multiple independent lines of evidence and the vast body of peer-reviewed science,” the AAAS letter reads. “There is strong evidence that ongoing climate change is having broad negative impacts on society, including the global economy, natural resources, and human health.”
But Curry, a noted skeptic of many of the claims of global warming alarmists, argued science groups shouldn’t be using science to press political goals. Indeed, AAAS is headed by Rush Holt, a former Democratic lawmaker.
“National security and economics (specifically called out in the letter) is well outside the wheelhouse of all of these organizations,” Curry wrote. “In fact, climate science is well outside the wheelhouse of most of these organizations (what the heck is with the statisticians and mathematicians in signing this?)”
“The rest are professional societies who are not involved with the physics of climate but explicitly profit from the alarm,” Curry said.
Professional science groups have been increasingly releasing statements on global warming science as the public debate heats up, but what’s odd about the current letter to Congress is the amount of non-climate related groups pushing lawmakers to stop questioning science.
For example, the American Public Health Association, the American Statistical Association and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics signed the letter, which Curry criticized.
