We Can Stop Pretending Any of the 2016 Republicans Believe in Science - The most ignorant answer of Tuesday night's GOP debate goes to Rand Paul.

I haven't been in school for like 15 years and my specialty is dendrology so I don't have this sort of stuff just laying around. Look at the entire climate record layed out with annotation. I dated back to warming from the younger dryas at 12,000 years which stabilized into the range that we've thrived in.

It might be a point of disagreement on when to start, but if you go back and look at the data we have going back as far as possible it's absurd to me to isolate this blink of an eye and call it normal when it is very clearly much warmer, more than just 2 or 4 degrees, than this planet averages.

I'm 100% for getting off of fossil fuel. I believe we do contribute to a problem radically. The issue I have with the climate change political argument is that there is a baseline temperature for the planet. There isn't. The last 10k years have been remarkably stable, even now, compared to history. So stable it almost doesn't make sense.

Personal theory, I think we have more to learn about the climate than the accumulation of stuff that we already do know. That's the reason I have an issue with the fact that it is a political football. The left uses it to control people with fear and the right pretends like it is an issue that doesn't need to be dealt with. Meanwhile, the issues that are going to kill us before an inhabitable climate are our industrial and consumer waste, effects of the scale of our global trade, and destruction of environments/habitats. No one talks about any of that with any sort of urgency at all because the only solutions are actual cultural changes. It's easier to just put up solar panels and windmills. We need to be doing it all.

/r/environment Thread Parent Link - newrepublic.com