Jim Inhofe snowball — Senator Jim Inhofe holds a snowball on the floor of the US Senate in a demonstration against climate change in February. Photograph: C-Span

Climate change and the Republican party: 'America is not a planet'

This article is more than 8 years old

As world leaders prepare for climate talks in Paris, Republicans are under fresh scrutiny for their refusal to acknowledge the science. Here, from the extreme to the merely contrary, is a sample of some of their statements

Donald Trump

Tweeted in November 2012: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.”

Tweeted in December 2013: “Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!”

Tweeted in January 2014: “This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice” and “Any and all weather events are used by the GLOBAL WARMING HOAXSTERS to justify higher taxes to save our planet!”

Said in September 2015: “I mean, Obama thinks it’s the number one problem of the world today. And I think it’s very low on the list. So I am not a believer, and I will, unless somebody can prove something to me, I believe there’s weather. I believe there’s change, and I believe it goes up and it goes down, and it goes up again. And it changes depending on years and centuries, but I am not a believer, and we have much bigger problems.”

Marco Rubio

Said in May 2014: “Our climate is always changing. And what they have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that’s directly and almost solely attributable to manmade activity. I do not agree with that.”

Said in September 2015: “We’re not going to make America a harder place to create jobs in order to pursue policies that will do absolutely nothing, nothing to change our climate. America is a lot of things, the greatest country in the world, absolutely. But America is not a planet.”

Ben Carson

Said in November 2014: “There’s always going to be either cooling or warming going on. As far as I’m concerned, that’s irrelevant. You can ask it several different ways, but my answer is going to be the same. We may be warming. We may be cooling.”

Said in October 2015: “Just the way the Earth rotates on its axis, how far away it is from the sun. These are all very complex things. Gravity, where did it come from?”

Ted Cruz

Said in October 2015: “Climate change is not science. It’s religion. Look at the language, where they call you a denier. Denier is not the language of science. Any good scientist is a skeptic. If he’s not, he or she should not be a scientist. But yet the language of the global warming alarmists, ‘denier’ is the language of religion. It’s heretic. You are a blasphemer.”

John Boehner

Said in May 2009: “Every time we exhale we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know when they do what they do you’ve got more carbon dioxide.”

Said in May 2014: “Listen, I’m not qualified to debate the science over climate change.”

Jim Inhofe

Said in October 2004: “Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. It was true when I said it before, and it remains true today. Perhaps what has made this hoax so effective is that we hear over and over that the science is settled and there is a consensus that, unless we fundamentally change our way of life by limiting greenhouse gas emissions, we will cause catastrophic global warming. This is simply a false statement.”

Said in February 2015, while holding a snowball he took to the floor of the Senate: “It’s very, very cold out. Very unseasonable.”

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