Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt suggests that global warming isn’t necessarily “a bad thing” because “humans have most flourished during times of … warming.” But recent years have been the warmest humans have seen over at least the last millennium.
The president exaggerates his accomplishments in his address to Congress.
In a recent interview with the British station ITV, President Donald Trump falsely implied the globe’s ice caps are at “record” high levels. But ice caps generally have been declining worldwide.
Sen. James Inhofe misleadingly claimed that the statistics behind the globe’s likely hottest years on record — 2014, 2015 and 2016 — were “meaningless” because the temperature increases were “well within the margin of error.” Taking into account the margins of error, there’s still a long-term warming trend.
In our roundup of 2016 claims, we hypothesized that SciCheck would have no dearth of false and misleading claims to cover in 2017. That proved true. Politicians kept us busy. As 2017 comes to a close, we present the most notable claims about science from this year.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions claimed that more car accidents were “caused” by drugs than alcohol for the first time in 2016. But the report his office cited as support didn’t show that.
The head of the House science committee falsely claimed the National Science Foundation funds “more than twice as many graduate students in the social and behavioral sciences as in computer science, mathematics or material science.”
The president’s speech on the Republican tax plan oversold the benefits of tax cuts and strayed from the facts on other issues.
Q: Does the National Institutes of Health fund research on human-animal chimeras, or organisms that are part-human, part-other animal?
A: With some exceptions, the NIH doesn’t fund research on human-animal chimeras. But the agency has proposed a rule to widen the scope of research it funds in this area.
Sen. Rand Paul misrepresented two studies supported by federal grants, while advocating legislation he introduced to change the federal grant funding process.