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Rubio: Humans aren’t behind climate change

Posted at 2:10 PM, May 12, 2014
and last updated 2014-05-12 14:10:54-04

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Sen. Marco Rubio says he doesn’t believe humans are causing climate change and doesn’t think any action can reverse course.

“I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” the first term senator from Florida said Sunday on ABC “This Week,” after being asked by ABC News’ Jon Karl whether humans were contributing to the heating up of the planet.

“I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy,” added Rubio, who’s seriously considering a bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

Rubio’s latest comments are similar to what he said on CNN last week.

“I think severe weather has been a fact of life on earth since man started recording history. I understand that there’s a vast consensus of scientists that are saying that human activity is what’s contributing to changes in our climate. I think it’s an enormous stretch to say that every weather incident that we read about or the majority of them are attributable to human activity,” Rubio told CNN’s Bill Weir Tuesday on “CNN Tonight.”

Rubio’s comments come as President Barack Obama’s administration last week declared, unequivocally, that climate change is underway across the United States. The U.S. National climate Assessment Report, released last Tuesday, offered a dire assessment of the impact of climate change, and named Miami as the city most vulnerable to damage from rising sea levels. The report was heavily criticized by many Republican lawmakers.

The U.S. isn’t alone in raising serious concerns. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came to the conclusion that humans are behind global warming.

In his CNN interview, Rubio knocked the administration’s report and criticized the President’s efforts on the issue of climate change.

“The President is, he’s not a meteorologist. Here’s what the President needs to be focused on. He’s proposing a certain set of policies that he would have to admit if questioned will do nothing. If in fact these scientists are right and it’s greenhouse gas emissions that are changing our climate, none of the things he’s proposing would do anything to change that whatsoever, but it would have a devastating impact on our economy.

The most recent national polling on climate chanted indicated that a majority of Americans said humans were causing global warming. According to a Gallup poll conducted in early March, 57% of the public said human activities were behind global warming, with four in ten saying natural changes were causing the earth to heat up.

Fifty-four percent of those questioned in the survey said the effects of global warming were already happening. But less than four in ten said that global warming would pose a threat to their way of life.

The poll indicated a major partisan divide, with a majority of Democrats saying they worried a great deal about global warming, but more than six in ten Republicans saying they worried only a little bit or not at all about climate change.