Yes, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) actually said this…during a hearing in the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power today…
Here’s what he actually said — out loud — via RAW STORY [emphasis added]…
“I would point out if you’re a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood is an example of climate change. And that certainly wasn’t because mankind overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”
You may remember Barton from 2010, after the BP oil spill in the Gulf, as the man who actually apologized to BP’s then CEO during a U.S. House hearing, for what he described as a White House “shakedown”, after the company agreed to pay some $20 billion to help clean up the unprecedented disaster and help restore the livelihoods of many who lost everything thanks to the spill.
Man, they really don’t come any dumber than this complete idiot, do they….*sigh*
This is from the 1996 NY Times:
“LONG before the splendid palaces and minarets of Istanbul lined its shore, the Bosporus was little more than a narrow spillway where fresh water from the ancient Black Sea flowed out to the Aegean Sea and on to the Mediterranean. Then rising sea levels worldwide brought about a cataclysmic reversal. Suddenly, sea water cascaded through the Bosporus with a force 400 times mightier than that of Niagara Falls, the terrifying sound of the roar carrying for at least 60 miles.
In perhaps less than a year, the Black Sea turned brackish and rose several hundred feet, inundating former shores and river valleys deep into the interior. The relentless waters encroached on the land at a rate of half a mile to a mile a day. More than 60,000 square miles of land were soon submerged, a 30 percent expansion in the Black Sea’s size, which essentially gave the body of water its modern configuration.”
The scientists speculated that given the timing (roughly 5500 BC) this event may have given rise to the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and also to Noah and the ark.
Or check the background on Glacial Lake Missoula. Epic floods due to climate change or the geological CW.
What’s so incredible is that fucking congress people can say this kind of shit without fear of embarrassment and with essentially no price to pay for being so goddamn ignorant because they will by and large get a pass and still be treated as if they are responsible, competent adults deserving of public office. There is no bar of stupidity too low for members of government. Which I guess is what people like Will Rogers, Kenneth Roberts, Ambrose Bierce, and Mark Twain have been saying all along.
White guys like him rule my world….And that’s why we’re going to hell in a basket. Ooh a biblical reference from the same book declaring Jesus is gonna save us all AFTER the destruction of our world thanks to individuals in power like this dumb-ace loser OIL sellout.
Forget the concerns of earth scientists and climate experts who have been monitoring, studying, and documenting the global planetary situation, because this bastard doesn’t give a rat’s ace. He is more than willing to endanger the future of numerous life forms and really screw up the ecology and tip the balance of our planetary systems for greed as House pimp for Keystone’s pipeline.
Mr. Barton doesn’t have to support the concerns, opinions, and findings acknowledged by the world climate experts globally in 2013 because he’s armed with the unprovable text of a faith based religious book.
Barton is an Oil-Qaeda operative.
No one said that other periods of climate change were human induced. Scientists are only saying that this one not only is human induced but that the CO2 numbers and other indicators are off the charts compared to those naturally occurring episodes. They are off the charts because we are regurgitating fossilized carbon back into the ecosystem. The carbon cycle system is not keeping up with the rate that we are belching the greenhouse gases (it doesn’t help that we are cutting down rainforests at a high rate too). We are doing just about everything we can do to accelerate this train towards the ecological changing disaster we have been warned about,
Barton is like a passenger on the Titanic who was convinced that the ship was unsinkable, and was not going to listen to any “gossip” about how the ship was sinking.
BTW the earth will not become a lifelass ball after climate change, but it may become very uninhabitable for many humans (or at least the numbers we have now), and the conflict that will ensue over the limited resources available in the future will shape how habitable the earth will be for those survivors.
Take THAT, science. Ancient Sumerians had a flood myth, so human-caused climate change does not exist!
“Viracocha rose from Lake Titicaca (or sometimes the cave of Pacaritambo) during the time of darkness to bring forth light.[5] He made the sun, moon, and the stars. He made mankind by breathing into stones, but his first creation were brainless giants that displeased him. So he destroyed it with a flood and made a new, better one from smaller stones.”
That’s proof that God/Viracocha destroyed the first version of the NBA.
I believe in the Bible and see no connection between the Great Flood and climate change. There are way too many dumb people today who claim to ‘believe in the Bible’ (know what everything in the Bible means). The Bible is an extremely complex document with numerous interpretations.