Up until this last experiment in American governance, it was widely expected that the secretary of Energy, a position responsible for our nation's nuclear weapons and reactor research, among other duties, would be a person with at least basic competency in the sciences. Past secretaries have included nuclear physicists, Nobel Prize winners, chemical engineers, and Navy admirals.
The new hire is known primarily for pledging to eliminate the department despite forgetting what it was. His own grasp of the sciences is just baffling.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry told CNBC Monday morning that he doesn’t believe carbon dioxide is primarily responsible for global warming, contradicting the overwhelming scientific consensus on the causes of climate change.
When asked by interviewer Joe Kernan whether CO2 is the “primary” driver of changing temperatures, Perry responded, “No, most likely the primary control knob is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in.”
This is an amazing level of gibberish, but coming from the freakin' secretary of Energy it's ... well, what do you even say? This is one of those declarations that's too stupid to even be wrong.
If you're at all versed in climate science you can vaguely suss out what's going on here. The first part is easy—Rick Perry does not believe in man-made climate change and, coming from the oil state of Texas, has decided he'll be denying the effects of burning fossil fuels on our atmosphere until he's dead and buried in the hot Texas ground. The denialism is just plain, market-driven denials.
But somebody, somewhere talked to him about the ocean's pivotal role in all this and he retained a sliver of it, and is regurgitating it back here in a scientifically addled game of telephone.
Yes, the oceans are a primary climate control knob, if you want to call them that. The oceans have been acting as a sink for both raw atmospheric heat and for carbon dioxide for a long while now—and it's been turning them , in turn, both hotter and more acidic. As they've been getting hotter, those oceans both expanding—that is, rising—and reducing seasonal and non-seasonal polar ice, which further reduces the earth's capacity to radiate solar heat at (especially) the North Pole and causes a feedback effect, and the major ocean currents can do very bad things, and the combination of it all puts Antarctic and Greenland glacier ice in peril, and so on. We've known all of this, and been able to directly measure it happening, for decades now.
None of this is evidence against carbon dioxide causing climate change: It's the proof that carbon dioxide is causing climate change. The additional carbon dioxide in the world's oceans is climate change. It's the bad thing we're trying to prevent. The oceans are the gargantuan heat sink that will drive rising tides and more severe storms. Rick Perry, who apparently is either an idiot or damn determined to pretend at it, is waving the entire dynamic off as "this environment we live in" while simply excising out the uncomfortable bit about us putting the carbon dioxide there to begin with.
It's the worst possible combination of scientific illiteracy and market-driven disinformation, all rolled up tight and, to our eternal discredit, put in charge of the nation's policies. Yet again, I mean—the same ball of stupidity and crookedness is also now running the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department and for all we know deciding what to stock in the Pentagon vending machines.