Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, suggested at a Congressional hearing that climate change could be combatted by altering the orbit of the moon, and asked an official from the U.S. Forest Service if there was anything her agency could do to do so.
Gohmert made the comments on Tuesday during a House Natural Resources Committee hearing on four pending bills, while he was questioning Jennifer Eberlien of the Dept. of Agriculture’s Forest Service.
“I understand, from what’s been testified to the Forest Service and the B.L.M. [Bureau of Land Management], you want very much to work on the issue of climate change,” Gohmert said.
“I was informed by the immediate past director of NASA that they’ve found that the moon’s orbit is changing slightly and so is the Earth’s orbit around the sun. We know there’s been significant solar flare activity. And so, is there anything that the National Forest Service or B.L.M. can do to change the course of the moon’s orbit or the Earth’s orbit around the sun? Obviously that would have profound effects on our climate.”
“I would have to follow up with on you on that one, Mr. Gohmert,” Eberlien responded, smiling.
“If you figure out there’s a way in the forest service you could make that change, I’d like to know,” Gohmert said.
Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., offered his own solution to Gohmert on Twitter Wednesday, suggesting that Marvel Comics’ character Captain Marvel could handle the job.
“She can alter planetary orbits with her superpowers. I’m going to work on a bipartisan resolution asking for her help,” Lieu tweeted.
As for the “immediate past director of NASA” Gohmert referred to in his remarks, that would likely be Jim Bridenstine, a former congressman from Oklahoma who had been a climate change skeptic, argued years ago that humans aren’t responsible for global warming. “Global temperature changes, when they exist, correlate with sun output and ocean cycles,” he said in remarks on the House floor in 2013.
He said that position had evolved by 2017, when then-President Donald Trump nominated him to be NASA administrator. Bridenstine told the Washington Post that after hearing from experts and reading up on the topic that “I came to the conclusion myself that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that we’ve put a lot of it into the atmosphere and therefore we have contributed to the global warming that we’ve seen. And we’ve done it in really significant ways.”
Bridenstine could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Gohmert is an outspoken opponent of Democrats’ plans to combat climate change, and has said previously he does not believe it is a manmade problem.
“We can’t do anything substantive about the climate change right now, when the moon’s orbit is apparently changing some, the Earth’s orbit is changing some, according to NASA,” he told Fox Business Channel last month.
A spokesperson for NASA did not return a call for comment, but the agency has long pointed towards human-made carbon dioxide emissions as the cause of current global warming.
“Earth’s climate has changed throughout history,” the agency’s website says.
“Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives,” but, the site says, “The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is extremely likely (greater than 95 percent probability) to be the result of human activity since the mid-20th century and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented over millennia.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
