US Representative Warns Against Climate Change ‘Hysteria’

Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) speaks at Placerville Town Hall in Placerville, Calif., on June 30, 2015. (Courtesy of Tom McClintock)

WASHINGTON—Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) criticized the claim by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) that the earth has only 12 years left if nothing is done about the so-called global warming crisis, at the Heartland Institute’s 13th International Conference on Climate Change on July 25 at Washington’s Trump International Hotel.

McClintock is the ranking Republican member on the House Natural Resources Committee’s Water, Oceans, and Wildlife subcommittee.

Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Environment subcommittee and the leading congressional advocate of the proposed Green New Deal that would cost up to $93 trillion to implement as it radically restructures the U.S. economy. President Donald Trump has attacked the Green New Deal, saying earlier in July that it would “kill millions of jobs.”

The claim that earthly life will come to an end in 12 years if the climate issue isn’t dealt with came from Ocasio-Cortez in January.

“Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like: ‘The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?’” the freshman lawmaker said.

The fight against climate change is war, and it’s “our World War II,” she added.

By contrast, McClintock told conference attendees during a keynote address, “I’ll give us another four and a half billion years, which is the amount of time the climate’s already been changing on the planet.”

The “hysteria” on the left over the climate needs to be challenged, he said.

“This would be amusing except that it continues to drive public policy despite the failure of every one of their predictions and forecasts to coincide with the actual data we’ve accumulated since this nonsense began. We’ve allowed ourselves once again to be thrown into panic from forces that have been at work shaping our planet since it formed.”

The left ignores science when it doesn’t advance their policy goals, he said.

“No one denies our planet is presently warming. It’s called the modern warm period. Carbon dioxide levels are increasing from the record lows of the Holocene” geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago.

“But warming is nothing new. Our planet has been warming on and off since the last ice age.”

“The left loves to call us climate change deniers,” McClintock said. “The fact is they deny the science of climate change—the science that documents dramatic changes in climate throughout the epochs that long predate the appearance of mankind.”

McClintock exhorted attendees to keep fighting for the truth.

“Science thrives on civil and dispassionate debate, so when someone tells you that the debate’s over, that dissent should be forbidden, [that] the dissenter should be personally attacked, that is not a scientist talking—that is a politician,” he said.

“No one is more courageous these days than a climate scientist in this oppressive political climate who’s willing to stand apart from the mob and stand upon the facts no matter how much ridicule, professional retaliation, and personal attacks they have to endure.

“History has revered and honored those who have done so in ages long gone by, and will again as the history of this era is finally recorded.

“Those future generations to come will remember with gratitude and admiration that there were organizations like Heartland and faithful servants of true science as those who are gathered here today willing to endure the injustices and excesses of political demagoguery to lead us out of the darkness of this hysteria and into the light of the bright future that our advancing technology and freedom can and will deliver if we let them,” McClintock said.