WASHINGTON – Representative Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) today dismissed a recent report that showed evidence for drastic climate change in 2012, saying that he’ll “believe it when [he] sees it.” According to Gohmert, the report—which was authored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and documented rising sea levels, among other climatic changes—is “a bunch of voodoo science,” that he won’t accept until “the ocean’s on [his] own front doorstep.”
Gohmert—who does not believe that human activity contributes to global warming—admitted that he hadn’t actually read the report, which he described as “way too full of science mumbo-jumbo to make sense of.” “But I had one of my interns summarize its conclusions, and they’re obviously malarkey,” Gohmert said. “Rising sea levels? Melting ice caps? Well now, if that were true, how come the water in my pool isn’t any higher than it was last year?”
According to the report, in 2012 many indicators of global warming intensified appreciably. Sea levels reached record levels, and the researchers documented “dramatic spikes in ocean heat content, a record melt of Arctic sea ice in the summer, and whopping temporary melts of ice in most of Greenland.” Such measurements led Deke Arndt, co-author of the report, to conclude that climate indicators are “all singing the same song that we live in a warming world.”
But Gohmert is arguing that Americans shouldn’t trust the word of “liberal scientists” like Arndt. “You shouldn’t believe anything is real unless you’ve witnessed it first hand,” Gohmert recently told a group of fifth graders visiting the Capitol. “Unless you read it in The Bible, of course.”
Gohmert says that heeding the report’s warnings and enacting government policies to reverse, or even slow, the course of global warming would be “like wasting toilet paper on a clean rear-end.”
“If money was toilet paper, the federal government would be down to only one or two squares,” Gohmert explained. “And we can’t risk using them until we know there’s a problem. Come see me when my living room is under water—maybe then we’ll discuss this issue.”
