At today’s Science Committee hearing to review the President’s proposed science budget, Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) dismissed human influence on the climate. “We’ve had climate change since the day the earth was formed, whenever that was, depending on whatever it is you believe,” he said with a nod to young-earth creationists, “and we’ll have climate change until the earth implodes, whenever that is.”
Posey questioned White House Science Advisor John Holdren in depth, clearly skeptical that there could be both natural climate changes over the billions of years the earth has existed and human-induced climate change.
Obviously we’ve had global warming for a long time. You can’t have one seamless ice age that encompasses three ice ages. We had to have warming periods between each of those. And so that is a natural phenomenon. Just because we’re alive now, the tectonics plate shifts aren’t going to stop, the hurricanes tsunamis aren’t going to stop, the asteroid strikes aren’t going to stop, they’ve been going on for eons and they’re going to continue to go on for eons.
“The difference between the circumstances you’re describing and the circumstance we’re in now is the changes imposed on the climate in large part due to human activity are faster than the ability of ecosystems to adapt,” Dr. Holdren responded, “and maybe even more importantly, faster than the ability of human society to adapt.”
“There are a lot of stresses, as you point out, we can’t control, but the stresses we can control that are placing burdens on our society we ought to think about controlling,” Holdren continued.
“No doubt about that,” Posey quickly interjected before challenging Holdren on how much of present-day climate change is due to human behavior.
“The natural changes, which we understand, and which are underway on a long term basis as we speak, would be if they were the only influences, be cooling the planet rather than warming it,” Holdren replied. “We would be in a long-term cooling trend as a result of the natural forces affecting climate which we understand. We are instead in a warming trend which suggests that human activity is overwhelmingly responsible for the difference. We would be having cooling based on natural forces, we’re having warming.”
Interrupting Holdren, Posey latched on to the mention of “cooling” to make a stammering joke about global cooling and Al Gore. “I remember the ‘70s,” he said. “That was the threat, we’re going to have a cooling that’s going to eventually freeze the planet. And that was the fear before Gore intervented—invented the Internet, you know, or uh, the other terms.”
Posey, who represents the coastal Florida district that includes the Kennedy Space Center, had previously expressed similar views on ice ages and global warming in a 2011 interview with conservative activist Victoria Jackson.
Full transcript: