fact finder
Status: 10/25/2022 3:14 p.m
In the individual committees of the Bundestag, AfD politicians invite highly questionable experts from time to time. Video excerpts from the hearings regularly provide fodder for conspiracy ideologues.
“Physicist exposes climate swindle in the Bundestag: ‘CO2 has no influence on the climate!'” and “Cardiac arrest among climate activists – expert Dr. Hans Peter Vögele destroyed all CO2 hopes in the first minute”. A video showing an excerpt of a hearing by the Committee for Economic Cooperation and Development in the Bundestag in mid-October is being distributed on relevant websites and social networks. The theme: “Climate-related damage and losses: helping people in the regions hardest hit by the climate crisis to cope”.
You can see Peter Vögele, who introduces himself as a natural scientist and, according to his own statements, has been dealing with the climate problem “for 30 years”. In the minutes that follow, Vögele says, among other things, that carbon dioxide (CO2) has no effect on the climate. The influence of CO2 on the climate is undisputed, as in the IPCC world climate report from August 2021 being held. It also says: It is clear “that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, the ocean and the land surfaces”.
Mojib Latif, Professor at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel, also points to this. On the other hand, he has never read a scientific publication on the subject of climate by Vögele.
Also at the request of ARD fact finder Vogele does not name any research of its own in this area and instead refers, among other things, to the “European Institute for Climate and Energy”, which was Federal Environment Agency in 2013 in the area of climate change skeptics was located with “theses that contradict the scientific consensus”. How is it that he can still appear as a supposed climate expert at the hearing?
Parties can nominate experts
To find out how Vögele made it into this round as an expert, it helps to take a look at how the experts are selected for such committee hearings. On the side of the Bundestag it says:
It is up to the committee how many experts are invited and how they are selected. Although the majority can prevent only experts from the minority from speaking, they must accept that the minority invites as many experts as they like from the total number of all experts, according to their share in the committee.
In other words: “The deputies of the parliamentary groups have the right to invite their experts to these meetings and to these committees,” says Kai-Uwe Schnapp, a political scientist at the University of Hamburg. The quota depends on the committee, the size of the parliamentary group and the type of hearing. “The parties themselves decide who is considered an expert,” says Schnapp.
This is also confirmed by Christoph Hoffmann, deputy chairman of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development: “There are no plans for the (deputy) committee chairman or the committee secretariat to examine the parliamentary groups’ proposals.” However, from his perspective, “opinion-making, the cause and the country are best served when parliamentary groups appoint scientifically renowned experts.”
“On the ticket of the AfD parliamentary group”
It is obvious which party Vogele named as an expert for the hearing in the committee, says Marie-Luise Beck, Managing Director of the German Climate Consortium (DKK): “Peter Vögele is running on the ticket of the AfD parliamentary group, which is known to be the facts on man-made climate change. His arguments have been known and thoroughly refuted for decades. The tragedy is that such public appearances always generate reverberations on social media, where wishful thinking clicks far better than facts.”
Climate researcher Latif sees it similarly: “The problem is always that people who don’t come from the field at all and don’t even work scientifically in the field get a voice. And they are then put on an equal footing with real experts, so to speak.”
Other committees also affected
Other committees are also aware of the problem. The health committee in particular has been used by the AfD in recent months to give supposed corona experts a stage. Videos of this are also distributed by the AfD itself. For example, in a hearing, the family doctor Gunter Frank was allowed to warn of a “Contergan scandal with a factor of ten” with regard to the corona vaccinations – in view of the suspected cases of serious side effects and vaccination complications reported by the Paul Ehrlich Institute 0.3 reports per 1,000 vaccine doses is an extremely questionable claim.
Arne Burkhardt, a retired pathologist who is often cited in conspiracy ideological circles, was also invited to a committee hearing. Burkhardt was among other things because of unsubstantiated claims about alleged deaths in connection with the corona vaccination noticed.
“In hearings of the health committee, the experts appointed by the AfD speak out, for example, against vaccinations, masks and other corona protection measures. This is deliberately provocative,” says Kirsten Kappert-Gonther, deputy chairman of the committee.
Claims are regularly made without a scientific foundation or studies are quoted that do not stand up to the usual scientific standards. There are derogatory statements or the wearing of symbols from the lateral thinker scene, which are difficult to bear and damage the democratic professional discourse.
Serious painting as “Bundestag expert”
The Greens politician Kappert-Gonther suspects a methodology behind the actions of the AfD. “It gives the impression that the hearings are primarily used to then act on social media with the image material,” she says. The recordings of such hearings, which are then often shared afterwards, are material from the Bundestag’s “parliamentary television”. This gives the videos an official and serious look – regardless of the content.
“The vast majority of people don’t know that it’s a partisan naming of the experts,” says political scientist Schnapp. “And this creates the interpretation: This is a Bundestag expert, what he says has to be right.”
At the request of the AfD parliamentary group spokesman ARD fact finder with the fact that for the party in the selection of experts in the foreground is “inviting experts who, in our opinion, can contribute to the clarification of important aspects of the respective topic to a particular extent.” As an experienced natural scientist, Vogele “provided important impulses in the hearing and gave detailed reasons for his objections to the theory of anthropogenic, CO2-induced climate change.”