WASHINGTON — Two years ago, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) pulled a political stunt he’ll likely never hear the end of. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, the staunch climate change denier took from a plastic bag a snowball — proof, he assured his colleagues, that global warming is nothing more than a hoax.
Before tossing the softball-sized mass to the presiding officer, Inhofe proudly stated, “In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair: You know what this is? It’s a snowball, that’s just from outside here. So it’s very, very cold out. Very unseasonable.”
Of course, his argument was completely flawed. What Inhofe failed to understand then, and likely never will, is that no single weather event can prove or disprove climate change. Additionally, extreme weather shifts, such as the record low temperatures he cited, argue for climate change, not against it.
But if you go by the congressman’s logic that a snowball on Feb. 26, 2014, somehow proved climate change is a hoax, so too would, say, a 99-degree day in February in Inhofe’s home state of Oklahoma suggest that it is not.
The Huffington Post reached out to Inhofe but was told by a spokesperson that the senator was traveling and could not be reached for comment. Along with the freak, record-breaking February heat, which brought temperatures in the 70s to Washington, D.C., this week, we hoped to get the senator’s thoughts about 2016 being confirmed as the hottest year on record. It marked the third consecutive year of record-high global temperatures.
In pleading his case two years ago, Inhofe asserted that “the script has flipped.” And the same can certainly be argued today.
The bottom line: Unless he’s got a stash of snowballs somewhere, the congressman is likely going to have to make his point some other way.
And if push comes to shove, he can always fall back on the word of God.
“[T]his is what a lot of alarmists forget: God is still up there, and He promised to maintain the seasons and that cold and heat would never cease as long as the earth remains,” he wrote in his book on climate change, titled The Greatest Hoax.
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