Sen. Murkowski—Who Got ANWR Opened To Oil Drilling—Wants GOP To Fight Climate Change

Somedays you can’t make this up. From the Washington Examiner (my comments after the jump):

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska., the chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, challenged her party on Wednesday morning to take climate change more seriously.

“We have to have a better discussion about climate change and the responses to it,” Murkowski said during an address at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners’ Winter Policy Summit.

“We have to not be afraid to use terms that some might say, that’s politically charged. Why is it politically charged to say climate change? I see in my state the impact we have from warming temperatures.”

Murkowski added it is “fact” that global temperatures are warming in response to man-made emissions of carbon dioxide, as the scientific consensus says.

Relying on consensus is exactly what a politician would say, not a real scientist. Since leaving the Little Ice Age circa 1850, temperatures have risen around one degree Celsius. But it’s still not as warm as the Medieval or Roman Warm Periods. Most of the temperature measuring stations prior to satellites were largely located in the U.S.

There are entire continents with missing or no data. Few were scattered across Europe, South America, same for Africa and other landmasses. Antarctica? Forget about it. Australian’s Bureau of Meteorology is one of few countries with a robust temperature dataset. And they’ve been fiddling with their data, too.

And during both World Wars, recording the temperature at an exact time and place (for consistency) as bombs are raining down on your country isn’t quite a priority. And the 1930s is still the warmest decade on record based on US data (because there simply wasn’t much data elsewhere).

The Trump administration and many Republicans downplay the impacts of climate change and say the science on the warming of the planet is imprecise.

“It is a fact when we see habitats changing because temperatures are warmer,” Murkowski said. “It is fact when sea ice that is multi-year ice is no longer in place where it has historically been. Working toward our energy future, we must be reducing emissions that contribute to climate change.”

The senator has got her so-called sea ice data completely mucked up. Because Alaska has had a few warm winters over the last couple of years due to naturally occurring events, she’s basing the rest of the world on the paltry view from her back porch.

I blame her niggardly grasp of the facts as a larger problem of our liberal media. If she only reads the Washington Post or NY Times, this would explain her myopic views. She also discounts sea surface temps, which make up over 70% of Earth’s surface.

If she could see Russia, she’d know it’s been having record-breaking cold and snow. Canada’s ice is so thick it’s trapping ships and hurting grey seal hunters. Ice along Russia’s coast is wreaking havoc on their shipping. Satellites also show tropical temperatures as having their sharpest drop.

Murkowski said policymakers are making it more difficult to combat climate change by not acknowledging the extent of the problem.

“This conversation is difficult,” Murkowski said. “We all know it’s difficult. We have to stop making it harder. Let’s stop making it harder.”

She said she recently asked a group of 18-year-old high school interns how to overcome the polarized conversation around climate change. Their message: “They said, stop calling one another names,” Murkowski said. “How simple and basic is that? Let us skip the name-calling and unproductive arguments and think about energy advances that are also climate solutions.”

But wait, despite this coming calamity, Murkowski expanded drilling in her state, specifically a region of the ANWR that will be mired in lawsuits. Her comments will be used as Exhibit A. Maybe she’ll propose solar panels and wind farms propped up next to the oil wells. Why would the caribou care?

Murkowski says politicians should continue to promote the use of fossil fuels because she says removing them from the grid entirely is unrealistic and costly.

She celebrated, in her speech to the state utility commissioners, her recent success in opening a portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, which was part of the GOP tax reform legislation.

Drilling in a the long-protected refuge will enhance America’s status as a “swing producer” in world oil markets, she said.

But she said energy leaders should pursue “balance,” a contrast to the “dominance” agenda flouted by the Trump administration.

I would admonish the senator to stop parroting talking points written by junk-science pioneer Al Gore and learn what actual climatologists tell us about climate science: it’s not settled.