Connecticut Climate Denier Chris Coutu Threatens Storm Readiness

A climate denier running for Congress in Connecticut has attacked a non-partisan panel tasked to prepare Connecticut in the wake of record damage from extreme storms in 2011 for recognizing the growing threat of global warming. State Rep. Chris Coutu, who denies not only man-made global warming but even the fact of the warming itself, rejects the recommendations of the Two Storm Panel because it dared to mention the “pseudo-science” of climate change:

Chris Coutu, who is running for Congress in the 2nd District, said the Two Storm Panel strayed “far from its non-political mission and into the political minefield of global warming.” “The “Two Storm Panel” had a simple, non-political task: determining how Connecticut can better prepare for and respond to major storms. Instead of simply focusing on solutions, the panel veered into politics with its recommendations for global warming,” Coutu said in a press release issued a few hours after the panel released its report.

“I don’t believe global warming’s occurring,” Coutu told the Hartford Courant. “There’s climate changes every year, there’s weather changes.”

Of course, it’s radical anti-science ideologues like Coutu who have made the scientific fact of global warming into a political issue, putting the residents of his state, our nation, and the entire planet at deadly risk. This panel is taking long-delayed action to protect Americans from the impacts of global warming caused by political inability to stop the fossil fuel pollution driving it.

“It’s global warming,” Sue Gress of New Canaan, Connecticut, told the New York Times in November. “No one wants to believe it, but things are changing. There’s much more violent weather, and we’re not prepared to deal with it.”

The Two Storm Panel’s report states that rising sea levels brought on by a warming planet “raises serious concerns about the need to protect critical infrastructure along the coast and adjacent to rivers.” Experts told the group that sea levels are expected to rise about 1.5 feet by the middle of the century and from 3 to 5 feet by the century’s end. The panel recommended new engineering standards to “better protect the built environment from the effects of extreme weather.”

“There is a reality that comes with the trend in climate change that we have to be better prepared for the future,” Gov. Dannel Malloy said. “We’re in a warming cycle,” James Skiff, the retired U.S. Air Force Major General who co-chairs the panel, told the Courant. “Sea levels are going to rise, that creates a higher storm surge.”