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:

Politico: Newt Gingrich recalls 1970 'global cooling'

Time: Sigh. The GOP cites "Global Cooling." Again.