New EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is being lampooned for downplaying the extent of carbon dioxide’s alleged effects on the climate. According to Pruitt, “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that [CO₂ is] a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.” You can imagine the uproar that ensued.

Critics responded with a slew of scientific information on the greenhouse gas effect and how scientists collectively agree that human-induced fossil fuels are most assuredly to blame for our warming climate. On the EPA’s own website it stipulates that “the primary human activity affecting the amount and rate of climate change is greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.” And Forbes’s Alex Knapp says, “We can get one thing clear — climate change is complicated,” but he goes on to confidently argue “the amount of carbon dioxide being emitted every year by humans is … happening faster than nature can take care of it.”

This ridicule, of course, is an effort to smear Pruitt and portray him as an anti-science rube. But pay close attention to what Pruitt also said in the same interview: “But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.” What he’s trying to say is that the climate debate is not etched in stone, which is what the ecofascist lobby so desperately asserts. Yes, we know that the greenhouse effect is real, but scientists are gravely mistaken if they think they’ve discovered all there is to know about how the climate operates.

For example, how consequential is water vapor, a much more potent GHG? The same ones who told us that the California and Texas droughts were permanent and that the Arctic sea ice would be gone by now want to lecture us on “what the science says.” Pruitt has a different approach: Let’s see what the facts say, which takes time. And that’s exactly why he’s the right man to lead the EPA.

Edited.