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Leading AK GOP U.S. Senate Candidate Joe Miller: ‘We Haven’t Heard There’s Man-Made Global Warming’

Following last night’s GOP Senate primary in Alaska, the race is “too close to call” between incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) and challenger Joe Miller. As of this writing, with “98 percent of precincts counted, Murkowski trailed political newcomer Joe Miller by 1,960 votes out of more than 91,000 counted.”

Earlier this week, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner interviewed Miller, probing him on a variety of issues. On global warming, Miller didn’t deny the existence of climate change, but that human activity was not responsible for it. He told the newspaper that “temperature change is a part of the process of our existence,” and that we “haven’t heard there’s man-made global warming”:

Miller doesn’t doubt that the climate changing, only to what extent humans are causing climate change. “I think it’s undeniable, that anyone who has looked at the natural record of the Earth can see significant cyclical changes well before the industrial age, so we know the temperature change is part of the process of our existence, and frankly, you’re probably aware in the ’70s there were real concerns about global cooling,” he said. […]

“We haven’t heard there’s man-made global warming,” he said. “Second, even if we proved that, we have not proven we have a solution that works. And third, even if we’ve proven that, we haven’t done a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the solutions like cap-and-trade that Sen. Murkowski has proposed are actually worth the cost to people.”

If Miller is unconvinced of the existence of “man-made” global warming, all he has to do is pay attention to the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN group “made up of hundreds of scientists from 113 countries” determined that “human-generated greenhouse gases account for most of the global rise in temperatures over the past half-century.” A 2009 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States found that “97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets” of the IPCC’s conclusion that man-made greenhouse gases are responsible for the planet warming.

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Skeptical Science, using data from several government agencies that monitor the global climate, created this graph demonstrating how the rise in carbon dioxide has closely tracked a rise in global temperature over time: