Trump's new head of the Environmental Protection Agency thinks carbon dioxide doesn't cause climate change:
Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, has dismissed a basic scientific understanding of climate change by denying that carbon dioxide emissions are a primary cause of global warming.
Pruitt said on Thursday that he did not believe that the release of CO2, a heat-trapping gas, was pushing global temperatures upwards.
“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” he told CNBC.
“But we don’t know that yet ... We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”
Actually, we do know that. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a collection of the world's top climate scientists, found in its Fifth Assessment Report that carbon dioxide levels were increasing as a result of human activity and that
Total radiative forcing is positive, and has led to an uptake of energy by the climate system. The largest contribution to total radiative forcing is caused by the increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 since 1750
In English, that's "we're getting hotter because we're burning too much coal and oil". Pruitt is simply wrong. But hey, what would scientists know?
