Hill Heat

Pennsylvania Congressman Keith Rothfus of the 12th District rejects the scientific fact of anthropogenic global warming. In a 2010 interview unearthed by Hill Heat, then-candidate Rothfus (R-Penn.) said he was “dubious” that global warming was “man-made” or a “fact.”

“I do not believe it’s man-made, and I am not convinced that it’s a fact. I think the science is still out. I think for the last 15 years we haven’t had any warming. I think you go back when we had a medieval warm period, where we were growing crops in Greenland. We could do that maybe if we kept warming up over the next 20 to 30 years. I do think the jury’s out on that. I’m very dubious as to whether or not this is what they call anthropogenic, man-made. When you talk about 280 parts per billion [sic] I think of carbon, these are very small amounts.”

In reality, the carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect is a physical fact known since the 1800s. The only scientifically plausible explanation for the rapid warming of the planetary climate since 1950 is industrial greenhouse pollution. Rothfus was off on his estimation of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a factor of 1000. Carbon dioxide levels have risen from pre-industrial concentrations of 280 parts per million to the present-day 400 parts per million, a 40 percent increase. Because of the hundreds of billions of tons of industrial carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere, the global climate is continuing to warm, with every decade since the 1970s warmer than the last, and the impacts of global warming are accelerating faster than scientists projected.

The so-called Medieval Warm Period was a period between the 10th to 15th centuries of higher than average solar radiation and lower than average volcanic activity where some parts of the world, including Greenland, were about as warm as have been in the past decade. During that period the global climate was significantly cooler than the present day.