Even Fox News can’t believe that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, doesn’t accept the basic scientific finding that carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to recent global warming.
To promote President Trump’s disastrous plan to gut the EPA and U.S. climate action, Pruitt has been pushing his dangerous beliefs on all the major networks.
Pruitt may have thought the Murdoch-owned network that has led the way on attacking climate science for two decades would be a friendly audience. He was wrong.
Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace thoroughly debunked Pruitt for defending his absurd claim that CO2 is not “a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”
Wallace will have none of it: “Mr. Pruitt, there are all kinds of studies that contradict you.” He quotes the conclusion of the world’s leading climate scientists in the U.N.’s 2013 assessment of the scientific literature that there’s a 95 to 100 percent chance “human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
Pruitt hems and haws and tries to gloss over his statement. Wallace then blasts him for “sugarcoating what you said,” and reduces the question to its simplest form. “What if you are wrong?” asks Wallace.
“What if, in fact, the earth is warming, what if it is causing dramatic climate change and we as humans through carbon emissions are contributing to it? Simple question, what if you are wrong?”
Pruitt can’t admit that possibility, so he hides behind the tiny mistake Wallace makes in an otherwise outstanding grilling of Pruitt. Wallace only asks what if humans are “contributing” to climate change, rather than hitting Pruitt on his denial that humans are the “primary” contributor.
This allows Pruitt to concede CO2 makes some contribution, assert “the issue is how much we contribute to it,” and sidestep the fact that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists — over 97 percent of them — understand that humans are the primary cause of climate change and thus are the primary solution.
As an important aside, the UN assessment of climate science that Fox News cited states clearly, “The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period.” That is, the best estimate by scientists is that humans are responsible for all of the warming we have suffered since 1950! Every major government in the world signed off on this finding.
Still, kudos to Chris Wallace for dismantling Pruitt’s lies. What a topsy-turvy world it is where Fox News takes on the role of defender of climate science. It seems even they draw the line at certain alternative facts.
The EPA is in trouble under Trump.
It’s ridiculous that someone like Pruitt, who has sued the EPA several times would be put in charge.
He’ll probably cut the budget even further and then require the gov’t agencies to redo all climate studies on a shoestring budget.
If the state governments were so committed to environmental protection, why was the EPA *ever* needed?
Why did we have rivers burning, decades of air pollution where major American metropolises had air as dirty as many in India & China today?
One good thing about that “shoestring budget” is that it will slow down the effort to rewrite many of the regulations that they want to get rid of—–it’s going to take a lot longer to get it done with fewer people working on it, years maybe for some of them.
When one of the Trumpers was told about that, the response was something to the effect of “Oh, that’s something else we didn’t think about before we leaped” (off the cliff).
Boy, these politicians are just plain stupid.
Reblogged this on AGR Daily News Service.
John Abraham in the Guardian: Scientists understood the climate 150 years ago better than the EPA head today
Scott Pruitt denies basic science that we’ve understood for over a century
Excellent and most interesting article. Thanks.
Christ almighty – is there NO BACKBONE left in any commentators? The overwhelming evidence is not that humans are a “contributor”, nor that humans are the “dominant contributor”, but that humans are the ONLY net contributor to global warming! That w/o our shennanigans, climate would have continued to cool very slightly during the past century!
Yep, and although they haven’t made a big deal about it, some deniers HAVE gone around bragging about how AGW has saved us from the upcoming ice age and we should be thankful for that. Maybe they’ll talk more about that when they’re done talking about how CO2 and a warmer planet are good for living things.
While good to see Fox “switching sides”, don’t think, for eve a second, that there is any sincerity behind it. If some miracle were to happen tomorrow and the entre Trump administration were to be replaced by a progressive administration, Fox would be back at the lies again.
Wow, that Chris Wallace, what a hero! Except when he moderated the Presidential debate and forgot to ask about this minor issue, at a time when it might actually have made a difference.