Marc Morano, a global warming skeptic and the editor of ClimateDepot.com, fought the climate sob stories peddled by Sierra Club Director Michael Brune with cold, hard facts on CNN Tuesday night.
“‘Global weirding’ is nothing more than a pseudoscience expression,” he said on Don Lemon’s “11th Hour,” pushing back against Lemon’s contention that the “extreme” cold weather wracking much of the country is a symptom of climate change.
“So record cold is now evidence of man-made global warming,” Morano said sarcastically. “What evidence would disprove climate change? It seems that no matter the weather, everything that happens proves it.”
“The bottom line is in 2013, we’re having one of the least extreme weather years on record,” he continued. “This report came out about a month ago. And if you look at the longer-term trends, there’s actually a declining or no trend in U.S. droughts or global droughts. There’s no trend in floods going back to, I think, 127 years — the one study is with the Journal of Nature on droughts. Tornados, big tornados, F3 and larger, have been on decline since the 1950s. Hurricanes. The U.S. has gone almost eight years now — over eight years — without a major category 3 or larger hurricane hitting, the longest period since before 1900. So on almost any measure of extreme measure, it ain’t there.”
Brune pushed back with squishy anecdotes, saying, “I’ve talked to ranchers in Nebraska who have lost their cattle because of the severe drought that they’re experiencing. I’ve talked to families in Texas — that massive wildfire out of Austin, Texas destroyed almost 1,200 homes in a period of 24 hours … If you haven’t experienced an extreme weather event in the last couple of year, give it a little time.”
The Sierra Club director claimed the “science is settled” and that the only people still arguing against climate change are paid by the fossil fuel industry. “He’s mentioning funding, by the way, which I think is funny,” Morano shot back. “The Sierra Club took $26 million from natural gas, and Michael has the audacity to try to imply that skeptics are fossil-fuel funded.”
Morano also got into it with climate activist Felipe Cousteau, who tried to catalog the human toll of carbon. “We need to get out of this bickering, and start dealing with the very human cost” of climate change, he said.
“When you have Felipe Cousteau talk about the children — children benefit from carbon-based energy,” Morano replied. “As you look around the world, 1.2 billion people don’t have running water, electricity, living in dire poverty. They need coal plants and natural gas and oil. That is the most pro-child thing you can do.
WATCH PART 2:
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