Head of Senate environment committee: If the climate is changing it’s because of God, not man

Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe (R), who is heretofore best known for tossing a snowball on the Senate floor to prove it's too cold outside for there to be such a thing as climate change, now seems to be inching toward accepting it's real. The caveat is that he says God is causing it.

Inhofe was a guest on conservative Family Research Council president Tony Perkins' program Tuesday where he promoted his faulty belief that because the global climate fluctuates, man-made climate change is a hoax, Right Wing Watch reports.

“They don’t understand,” Inhofe said. “God’s still up there and there’s a reason for this to happen.”

Inhofe, who is chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, also said he thinks there are maybe "a couple hundred people" out there who believe "the world is coming to an end and man-made global warming is going to cause it."

Inhofe is the author of The Greatest Hoax, a book in which he argues that climate change is nothing more than trickery to enable taxation and regulation. It's garnered some scathing reviews on Amazon.

"It's like a judge presided over a court case where the murder was not only observed by several witnesses killing someone, but also videoed, recorded in the act, left DNA, fingerprints and fiber samples all over the corpse and himself, wrote that they did the act in blood on the wall, and then who signed a confession, finding the murder completely innocent, and then determining that the murder was done by some huge conspiracy, who framed an innocent man," one reviewer wrote. "The idea that climate change scientists are colluding in some massive conspiracy is a paranoid delusion of extreme proportions."

Another reviewer was similarly not impressed.

"The book gets off to rather an unfortunate start on the cover with the absurd contention that thousands of scientists working independently over decades, publishing countless papers in peer reviewed journals, have somehow managed to coordinate, or at least are complicit in constructing and perpetuating a 'hoax,' Dave Smith wrote. "The enormity of that accusation is staggering in its implications and the lack of understanding of science and the scientific process and more importantly perhaps, the scientific community."

In March, the Guardian revealed Inhofe may have some vested interest in climate change denial, as a recipient of campaign donations from British Petroleum.

Listen to Inhofe's comments, as posted by Right Wing Watch, here: