Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) rejects the scientific fact of anthropogenic global warming. In a December 2011 interview uncovered by Hill Heat, Posey told conservative activist Victoria Jackson that climate change has nothing to do with human activity:
If we’ve had at least three ice ages, and some people, some scientists say five, you cannot have five seamless ice ages. You must warm up between, you know, to have them. The earth has had tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions tectonic plate shifts, meteor strikes, asteroid strikes, for millions of years, and it’s not going to stop just because we’re here now. When you think back twenty years ago, the worry was global freezing. “We’re going to freeze again. We’re going to have another ice age.”
In reality, the carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect is a physical fact known since the 1800s. The only scientifically plausible systematic explanation for the rapid and continuing warming of the planetary climate since 1950 is industrial greenhouse pollution. Paleoclimatologists have identified at least five major ice ages in the past 2.5 billion years of Earth’s history. We are currently in an interglacial period within the Quarternary or Pleistoscene ice age, defined by the permanent Antarctic ice sheet which formed 2.58 million years ago. There have been eight cycles of glaciation and retreat in the past 740,000 years. Levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to industrial pollution are at levels not seen in the past 740,000 years, and likely not seen at any point during the current ice age. WIthout global policy to end the combustion of fossil fuels, concentrations are expected to double from current levels within decades.
Posey, elected to Congress in 2008, is a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. He has received $33,700 from the energy sector including $19,900 in lifetime political contributions from the oil and gas industry. His district includes the NASA Kennedy Space Center, Eastern Florida State College, and the Florida Institute of Technology.