Fox News reporter: Temperature 'hasn't changed much since the Ice Age'

Fox Business reporter Tracy Byrnes says that climate change is overblown because the temperature of the Earth "basically hasn't changed much since the Ice Age."

During his Tuesday show on the Fox Business Network, habitual climate-change denier Stuart Varney pointed to an op-ed by Princeton Professor William Happer as evidence of another "nail in the coffin of global warming hysteria."

"CO2 is not a pollutant," Happer wrote. "Life on earth flourished for hundreds of millions of years at much higher CO2 levels than we see today. Increasing CO2 levels will be a net benefit because cultivated plants grow better and are more resistant to drought at higher CO2 levels, and because warming and other supposedly harmful effects of CO2 have been greatly exaggerated. Nations with affordable energy from fossil fuels are more prosperous and healthy than those without."

"We're not in global warming," Fox Business host David Asman agreed. "That has to be emphasized, screamed out at the top over everybody's lungs. That's why they changed the rhetoric from global warming to climate change. Because even the folks that advocated that we are in global warming realize that it hasn't been that way."

"The temperature basically hasn't changed much since the Ice Age," Byrnes announced. "But this notion that we're now getting to a point where carbon dioxide is bad, I mean, I think these guys have pretty much fallen over the cliff."

"Sun spots have much more to do with the temperature on the Earth than CO2," Asman insisted. "That's what scientists are beginning to understand."

Temperatures in Antarctica were around 50°F cooler than in modern times when the most recent Ice Age peaked about 20,000 years ago, according to Paleoceanography.

Scientists on Monday warned that the world was near a tipping point when global warming would become irreversible.

"This is the critical decade," Australian National University's Climate Change Institute executive director Will Steffen explained. "If we don't get the curves turned around this decade we will cross those lines."

Watch this video from Fox Business Network's Varney & Co., broadcast March 27, 2012.

(H/T: Media Matters)