Kansas state Sen. Mike Thompson has a lot to say about climate change.
Is it ironic or perhaps poetic justice that his opinions are nothing more than hot air?
Speaking to the Kansas Independent Oil and Gas Association annual convention in Wichita earlier this month, Thompson — a Republican state senator from Johnson County and chairman of Senate Committee on Utilities — presented a seminar on “The Weaponization of Climate Change.”
He claims that climate change is natural and humans have little agency over it.
“Climate change has been happening since Earth has been around naturally, natural cycles, with stuff that’s more powerful than anything humans can do,” he told those present.
Furthermore he believes the narrative most of the greater scientific community holds to be true about climate change is nothing more than propaganda.
“Science has just become a weapon,” he said. “So we basically turned real science into we’re all gonna die in 12 years, OK. And unfortunately, this is the culmination of the dumbing down of America. People buy this stuff. They hear it on the news. They think global warming is real. We’re all gonna die.”
He added that higher carbon dioxide levels will lead to hardier more drought resistant crops.
He offered up a whole lot more and we’ll spare you the details. But needless to say it was enough to trigger a fact check from The Topeka Capital-Journal.
Here’s the deal, folks: There’s such a thing as scientific fact, and Thompson, a retired television meteorologist, should have the common sense not to write it off as opinion.
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently issued a nearly 4,000-page report calling climate change “a code red for humanity.”
He and other speakers, including former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, wrote off climate change. Pompeo was busy cracking jokes about Greta Thunberg and Jennifer Granholm.
Their words are dangerous. They imply the dismissal of research by apolitical groups. They imply they know more about our planet, about agriculture. They imply they know more than what trial and error and the scientific method have proven.
Oddly enough, Thompson did present an axiom we agree with. Even though he used it with a different intention, it’s still accurate: “You tell a lie big enough. You keep telling it. Eventually it becomes true.”
You’re absolutely right, Senator. We just wish you’d stop lying about climate change.
