NEW YORK -- Denying climate change is "like denying gravity." That’s the unambiguous message from Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States.
Speaking to VICE founder Shane Smith in a recent interview for HBO, Biden, who is likely to contest Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2016, said: "It gets to the point where you can't look anyone in the eye seriously and say, well, it's nothing having to do with manmade."
On members of Congress who deny climate change, Biden said, "It's almost like denying gravity now... the willing suspension of disbelief can only be sustained for so long."
One such climate change denier is Republican James Inhofe, chair of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. Last week he became the object of global ridicule by trying to disprove the concept of anthropogenic climate change by bringing a snowball into the Senate.
Inhofe’s argument ran as follows: it’s cold outside so climate change isn’t real.
Inhofe's definitive proof that man-made climate change is not real
The Senator from Oklahoma is well-known conspiracy theorist, delivering a speech to the chamber in 2013 in which he suggested President Obama’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emission was in fact a nefarious plot to enslave the American people.
He said: "Their [Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency] goal is not to protect the American people, it is to control them. They want top-down control, and carbon dioxide regulations will give this to them."
In his recent book The Greatest Hoax, Inhofe explained why he is able to dismiss decades of meticulous scientific inquiry into climate change. His answer? God.
He wrote: "I take my religion seriously. This is what a lot of alarmists forget: God is still up there, and He promised to maintain the seasons and that cold and heat would never cease as long as the earth remains."
To bolster this cast-iron logic, the Senator quoted Genesis 8:22:
As long as the earth remains
There will be springtime and harvest
Cold and heat, winter and summer
So… you can all sleep easy knowing that in 80 years when the Earth is 5 °C warmer than it was before the industrial revolution, an angry Bronze Age deity will be on hand to smite the carbon.