Texas oil regulator: Science not settled on global warming

Railroad Commission member says issue has been politicized.

Contrary to widely held conclusions by scientists, a senior official in Texas’ oil and gas regulatory agency said Tuesday “we don’t know whether manmade greenhouse gases are impacting our climate in a harmful way.”

Wayne Christian, a Republican elected in 2016 to the state Railroad Commission, which oversees oil and gas operations, made the comment in an opinion piece for the Texas Tribune.

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases act to trap heat from the sun in the Earth’s atmosphere, according to scientists, leading to a warming planet.

But in his opinion piece, Christian, who got much of his campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, wrote “real science is never ‘settled.’”

“The politicization of climate ‘science’ and related attempts by academia and the mainstream media to shame ‘climate deniers’ is both wrong and dangerous for our democracy,” he wrote.

“We need to set politics aside and have the courage to admit what we know and, more importantly, what we don’t know — and we don’t know whether manmade greenhouse gases are impacting our climate in a harmful way,” he continued. “What we do know is that more than 1 billion human beings don’t have access to enough electricity, and as a result, have shorter, more difficult lives. It is time for us as a civilization to put mankind first and work to ensure that energy is cheap, plentiful and reliable for everyone.”

John Nielsen-Gammon, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University who serves as Texas state climatologist, told the American-Statesman that while “harm” is a value judgment, greenhouse gas emissions are “certainly impacting our climate in ways that are raising temperatures, increasing evaporation, and increasing the intensity of heavy rainfall. And those have consequences.”

He said that while there are different degrees of scientific certainty, climate scientists have found two incontrovertible facts: carbon dioxide is increasing because of industrial activity and carbon dioxide has a warming effect on the climate.

“In principle you never know anything for certain in science, but you can make an awful lot of progress in society by taking for granted things that are solidly known,” he said.

Nielsen-Gammon said no one in Christian’s office had contacted him about climate science.

Christian’s views on climate science reflect those held by many top-ranking Texas Republicans.

Gov. Greg Abbott, for example, has said more investigation on the matter is required.

Christian’s two fellow commissioners say it remains an open ques- tion how much humankind contributes to a changing climate.

Chairwoman Christi Craddick believes “some of it is naturally occurring, some of it is caused by manmade activity,” her spokeswoman, Lauren Spreen, told the American-Statesman.

“The question really for her is how do we address this issue in a thoughtful way that doesn’t compromise economic growth or the affordability of energy or jobs for our country.”

Fellow Railroad Commissioner Ryan Sitton told Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith in 2016 that “nothing has been so politicized, I think, in modern history as climate science.”

“The fact is the global temperatures are fluctuating up and down, it’s been going on a long time, everybody knows that,” he said.

“The question is, ‘What degree of impact do we have?’ No one has answered that quantitatively,” he said, arguing that questions remain about scientific models.