Friday, May 27, 2011

Newt Gingrich answers climate change question (Video)

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich campaigned in Manchester, New Hampshire on Wednesday. While talking to voters at a Granite Oath PAC house party, the former Speaker of the House fielded a question about climate change. Here is what he had to say:


Voter: I’d like to commend you for your bravery in condemning the political unviability of the Medicare plan. That’s what we need a lot more of and I hope voters will weigh that more carefully. My own preferences lean towards the means testing of the intake – the money coming in to pay for it – and the money going out… means testing also…
But I’ve been meaning to ask, would you apply that same type of truth telling to the climate/global warming problem?
Newt Gingrich: Sure.
Voter: You have the National Academy of Science's 2+2=4 telling us, ‘Caused by humans, getting worse, we need to deal with it right away.’ Why don’t we hear that from a Republican candidate? A pro-business, pro-economic, pro-New Hampshire way of dealing with the problem.
Newt Gingrich: Well first of all, I think it’s fair to have hearings on the National Academy of Sciences report.
But I’ll also tell you, I mean I wrote a book called A Contract with the Earth, which was an outline of a green conservatism that applied conservative principles to the environment. I used to teach environmental studies. And sometimes when you see 7,000 scientists sign a petition what you are looking at is political science, not science.
Now, I’ll give you two examples of why I say this.
Anybody who walks into me and tells me they can tell what is going to happen to the climate over the next hundred years, which is the essence of this argument, I would say to them, ‘Fine, explain to me why 11,000 years ago the Gulf stream cut off and Europe has a little Ice Age for 600 years and then why 10,400 years ago the Gulf stream started up and the little Ice Age disappeared.
And they will all tell you, ‘You know we actually don’t understand that.’
Now, an Ice Age across all of Northern Europe was a pretty big deal.
I’m an amateur paleontologist, I’m very interested in the age of dinosaurs. It was substantially warmer in the age of dinosaurs. There were no cars, at least not that we’ve been able to find. No factories.
So one of my questions is… I have two different questions about this:
To what degree are we certain that we don’t have patterns we don’t understand yet, that may or may not involve human contributions?
And my second question is, are we better off to think through – and nobody in the scientific community would even think this – are we better off to think through how to cope with it than we are to think through how to avoid it?
It may well be that it is dramatically less expensive to adjust to a change in climate than it is to stop the entire planet from changing.
Now, if you were a left wing intellectual, climate change is the newest excuse to take control of lives and you want a new bureaucracy to run our lives on behalf of the newest thing. But remember, in the mid-1970’s there was a cover of Newsweek and Time that says we’re in the age of a brand new glacial period and they had a cover of the Earth covered in ice. This is the 1970’s. Now many of those scientists are still alive and they were absolutely convinced. I mean, if Al Gore were able to in the 1970’s we would build huge furnaces to warm the planet against this inevitable coming Ice Age.
I’m not disputing or discrediting the National Academy of Sciences, I’m saying a topic large enough to change the behavior of the entire human race is a topic that is more than science and deserves public hearings with very tough minded public questions and we’ve had almost none of that on either side. You have the people over here saying it’s not true. You have the people over here saying, ‘Oh, it’s going to happen Thursday.’ You have almost nobody saying in a practical, calm way, ‘Let’s walk through the material and find out what the facts are.’

Media coverage:


11 comments:

  1. Your site deleted my comment since I wasn't already signed into Wordpress?! Then when I log onto Wordpress it claims I "don't own that identity" and once again deletes my comment. Thank god for the clipboard.

    Ugh, he's noticed that the wind direction has changed so now he's backpedaling. He's read too many big fat history theory books. Everything is a grand societal shift to him. Does he have any actual principles or is he just an ADD guy?

    Here Can't you leave your cult religion out of *any* argument? I will never send a donation to those who claim climate change is the issue when they really just want to clean up some garbage. It would be so nice to find a real article about real efforts to do real things that didn't stick to high heaven of silliness.

    Here I present The Quick Glance Guide to Global Warming:
    Denial: http://oi52.tinypic.com/2d8qg5t.jpg
    Oceans: http://oi53.tinypic.com/35b9g08.jpg
    Thermometers: http://oi52.tinypic.com/2agnous.jpg
    Ice: http://oi52.tinypic.com/2upvlvm.jpg
    Earth: http://oi54.tinypic.com/dw2nhw.jpg
    Authority: http://oi53.tinypic.com/nqzj1f.jpg
    Prophecy: http://oi52.tinypic.com/29bh95e.jpg
    Psychopathy: http://oi52.tinypic.com/i56fsg.jpg
    Thinker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n92YenWfz0Y

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  2. Ignore my third paragraph. I copied it from another post about cleaning up garbage from Mt. Everest. It just *had* to conclude with a huge hat tip to Global God Damned Warming.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Don't bother to look at any of the disinformation that NikFromNYC posted, it's all crap. If you do look at it, check it against http://www.skepticalscience.com/

    Skeptical Science teases-out the REAL truths behind the lies of the Denier Myths and compares what the science says with the myths as spread by deceivers and unsurprisingly, the myths turn-out to be lies. Skeptical Science points to the science, so you can read it for yourself.

    Dig a little deeper and it turns-out that the purveyors of the myths are often funded via think-tanks by Koch, Exxon, Peabody, chevron, Western fuels et al. Essentially, Big Oil and Big Coal, plus energy intensive industry.

    They've been funding liars for a long time. Who's going to pay for it? We all are.

    Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science
    http://bit.ly/29B5Ki

    Koch Industries Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine
    http://tinyurl.com/Secret-Funding

    Koch Industries: Still Fueling Climate Denial 2011 Update
    http://tiny.cc/SecretFunding2011Update

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  4. NikFromNYC posted a great deal of highly suspect stuff.
    For example sea-levl rise and temperatures. The trouble is that a few posting graphs is very susceptible to cherry-picking. individual measurements are just that, it requires to be put into context to see the whole picture.
    BTW, NikFromNYC, posting pictures of astronauts is a typical denier tactic. They may be brave American icons, but that doesn't mean they know anything about climate. How many peer-reviewed articles have the published about the climate in a relevant scientific journal? I'll hazard a guess: most probably none.

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  5. Oh goody, more hearings followed by more hearings followed by more hearings. If Newt can't hear the the messages what's the point in hearings. I suggest he start listenings instead of hearings.

    If he's not prepared to do anything to stop global warming, why doesn't he get out of the way and let in all the people who want to stop it.

    Crazy USA. And after all the weather disasters this past 6 months. We're thinking the USA wouldn't know your own nose if you felt it on your face.

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  6. I've taken the Gingrich transcript and added some annoations with links. You can see it at

    https://www.facebook.com/notes/climate-change-in-the-presidential-primaries/newt-gingrich-answers-climate-change-question-in-manchester-new-hampshire-friday/158596454205865

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  7. Envirosocialism has never been about the environment. It's about money and power in the New World Order. Global warming has been a convenient panic tool to herd a scientifically uneducated public into useful political positions to further the cause. When the tool no longer is effective and the grant money runs out, something else will be found.

    After Climategate, Fabians and post capitalists came to a stymie. No imagination-just drink the Koolaide and plow straight ahead...

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  9. Politics is definitely interesting. Thanks for posting this article. Although it's a bit old, it still makes for a good read.

    Thanks!

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  10. Newt Gingrich's response to the climate change question was thought-provoking and well-articulated. Why Is Online Privacy Important In Todays Digital Age His insights shed light on different perspectives surrounding the solutions.

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