Chief Doubts Consensus View of Climate Change -
By CORAL DAVENPORTMARCH 9, 2017
WASHINGTON — Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on Thursday
that carbon dioxide was not a primary contributor to global warming, a statement at odds with the established scientific consensus on climate change.
Asked his views on the role of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas produced by burning fossil fuels, in increasing global warming, Mr. Pruitt said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box”
that “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.”
“But we don’t know that yet,” he added.
A report in 2013 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of about 2,000 international scientists
that reviews and summarizes climate science, found it to be “extremely likely” that more than half the global warming that occurred from 1951 to 2010 was a consequence of human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
In addition to putting him at odds with the consensus of climate scientists, Mr. Pruitt’s remarks also raise the possibility that, as the Trump administration
moves forward with unwinding Mr. Obama’s climate change regulations, it could put the administration in violation of federal law.
A January report by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded, “The planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit
(1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.”
Benjamin D. Santer, a climate researcher at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said, “Mr.
