The EPA debunked Administrator Pruitt’s latest climate misinformation | Dana Nuccitelli

Until Pruitt deleted the EPA climate webpages.

Last week, a Las Vegas news station interviewed Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. The interviewer brought up the topic of climate change, and virtually everything Pruitt said in response was wrong, and was often refuted on his own agency’s website, until he started deleting it.

Our activity contributes to the climate changing to a certain degree. Now measuring that with precision, Gerard, I think is more challenging than is let on at times.

Research indicates that natural causes do not explain most observed warming, especially warming since the mid-20th century. Rather, it is extremely likely that human activities have been the dominant cause of that warming.

The Earth is getting warmer because people are adding heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, mainly by burning fossil fuels … People are causing these changes, which are bigger and happening faster than any climate changes that modern society has ever seen before.

Analysis: Why scientists think 100% of global warming is due to humans | @hausfath @_rospearce https://t.co/9DqrYVMnBj pic.twitter.com/oGN5J8a1PO

I think there’s assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing.

Scientific studies indicate that extreme weather events such as heat waves and large storms are likely to become more frequent or more intense with human-induced climate change.

The negative impacts of global climate change will be less severe overall if people reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we’re putting into the atmosphere and worse if we continue producing these gases at current or faster rates.

Is it an existential threat - is it something that is unsustainable, or what kind of effect or harm is this going to have? We know that humans have most flourished during times of, what, warming trends? … Do we know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100 or year 2018? It’s fairly arrogant for us to think we know exactly what it should be in 2100.

There is no one perfect temperature for the earth, but there is for us humans, and that’s the temperature we’ve had over the last few thousands of years when we built our civilization, agriculture, economy, and infrastructure. Global average temperature over the last few millennia has fluctuated by a few tenths of degrees; today, it’s risen by nearly 1°C and counting.

Why do we care? Because we are perfectly adapted to our current conditions…

Renewables need to be part of our energy mix, but to think that’s going to be the dominant fuel, or dominant energy source on how we generate electricity, I think is simply fanciful … There was a declared war on coal. The EPA was weaponized against certain sectors of our economy – fossil fuels generally - and that’s not the role of a regulator.

[Paris] was a bad business deal for this country … it was not about CO2 reduction. If it was about CO2 reduction, they would not have let China and India take until 2030 to reduce their CO2 footprint.