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Scott Wagner Explains Climate Change: 'We're Moving Closer to the Sun'

posted by on Saturday April 01 2017, @05:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the sounds-logical dept.

mrpg writes:

Scott Wagner is an American businessman and state senator from the state of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Republican Party. What did he say?

"I haven't been in a science class in a long time, but the earth moves closer to the sun every year-you know the rotation of the earth," Wagner, a York County state senator, said, according to StateImpact Pennsylvania. "We're moving closer to the sun."

He added, according to StateImpact's Katie Meyer, that, "We have more people. You know, humans have warm bodies. So is heat coming off? Things are changing, but I think we are, as a society, doing the best we can."

I haven't been in a science class in a long time...

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01 2017, @10:26AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01 2017, @10:26AM (#487567)

    Is the delta year to year some sort of exponential function? Why, after billions of years, is the Earth only heating more much more now?

    Does it make more sense if you assume Earth is ~5000 years old? Because I'm 99% sure this guy believes it is.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01 2017, @05:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01 2017, @05:54PM (#487681)

    Nope, 6000 years. The Ussher chronology puts creation at 4004 BC, we're just past 2000 AD, that's 6000 years.

    This actually matters, because there were some hilarious kooks predicting the end-times starting in 2000 AD on the basis that:

    1. God created the world in six days, and rested the seventh (thus inventing both the weekend, and the practice of working Saturday for that sweet time-and-a-half pay!)
    2. There's a prophesied "millennium", an intermission of peace during the end-times. Basically, there's a bloody turmoil for a while (possibly 7 years), with rivers and seas boiling, then Jesus comes back, beats the Devil up, binds him and throws him in the woodshed, and everything's sunshine and roses, lions lying down with lambs, and dogs and cats living together, for a thousand years, while the Devil gradually frays his bindings on the world's dullest conveniently placed rusty nail. The Devil finally breaks loose, Jesus beats him up again, and throws him in the fires of Mount Doom, making everyone wonder why he didn't do that to begin with.
    3. In a passage of scripture, we read "a thousand years is as a day" to him. This could be meant to indicate that God's perception of time is utterly unlike ours (and, specifically, that when he promised Jesus' return would be "soon", we weren't meant to read it as "soon" on a human timescale), but it's definitely also a secret clue that we should apply to a completely unrelated scripture.

    With a little sprinkling of kooky dust, it's just obvious there would be 6 millennia of "hard work", followed by one millennium of "rest", thus the end-times start at 1996 AD, give or take a few years potential error in a date arrived at in part by summing dozens of time intervals measured to whole-year precision.

    I suppose those kooks still believe it, and just keep attributing ever greater errors to Ussher's chronology.* Whereas if they believed the Earth was 5000 years old, and we had a thousand years left to live in it, they might care more about not wrecking the ecosystem for their great-great-grandchildren...

    *Which, in all honesty, is fair enough; there's plenty of good reasons to question Ussher even within the framework of young-earth biblical literalism, both from the previously mentioned stackup of rounding errors, and from the parts of the chronology not established in scripture, and thus based on matching (fallible) archaeological dates to events in (infallible) scripture; in fact a number of similar efforts by Newton and others came up with dates as late as 3900 BC, giving us decades more.)