Businessman Ron Johnson, the likely Republican nominee against Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), says that man-made global warming is a myth — it’s sunspots that are to blame for climate change. Furthermore, he said, more carbon dioxide is a good thing that helps trees grow.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports on an interview that Johnson did with the paper’s editorial board:
“I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change,” Johnson said. “It’s not proven by any stretch of the imagination.”
Johnson, in an interview last month, described believers in manmade causes of climate change as “crazy” and the theory as “lunacy.”
“It’s far more likely that it’s just sunspot activity or just something in the geologic eons of time,” he said.
Excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “gets sucked down by trees and helps the trees grow,” said Johnson.
A sunspot is the product of magnetic activity that causes a region of the sun several times the size of Earth to become relatively cooler than the surrounding area — but still at several thousand degrees Celsius. The affected area becomes darker and the surrounding area then becomes a bit brighter, resulting in a slightly hotter solar radiation overall, and the magnetic activity can also cause radio and satellite interference.
However, sunspot activity has actually declined over the last ten years. And as Think Progress also links, overall solar radiance has gone down while global temperatures have gone up — explained by a greater greenhouse effect on the planet’s end of the action.
The TPM Poll Average, Johnson currently edges Feingold by 48.8%-46.9%.
Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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