Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King told a crowd in Fort Dodge that global warming was more “religion” than actual science.
“It is not proven, it’s not science. It’s more of a religion than a science,” King said while on the “Bruce Braley Big Government Tour,” sponsored by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity.
Earlier this summer, President Obama unveiled his new plan to tackle global warming and cut U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. His announcement was welcomed by environmental groups, which see these emissions as the main driver of global warming.
“[W]e also know that the climate is warming faster than anybody anticipated five or 10 years ago,” Obama said at a Chicago fundraiser in May. “I don’t have much patience for people who deny climate change, but if you’ve got creative approaches, market-based approaches, tell me about them.”
However, scientists have started to readjust their warming predictions due to the fact that global temperatures have been flat for the past 15 years.
During a July hearing of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter asked a panel of climate experts if any could “say they agree with Obama’s statement that warming has accelerated during the past 10 years?”
After several seconds of silence, one of the panelists said the U.S. should consider periods of flat temperatures longer than 10 years, but conceded that warming trends had slowed rather than accelerating.
King said that global warming wasn’t only a bad thing.
“Everything that might result from a warmer planet is always bad in (environmentalists’) analysis,” King said. “There will be more photosynthesis going on if the Earth gets warmer. … And if sea levels go up 4 or 6 inches, I don’t know if we’d know that.”
“We don’t know where sea level is even, let alone be able to say that it’s going to come up an inch globally because some polar ice caps might melt because there’s CO2 suspended in the atmosphere,” he added.
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