Greg Gutfeld of Fox News spouted some dubious “logic” about climate change on Wednesday. (Watch the video below.)
Gutfled, a co-host of “The Five,” appeared to acknowledge that global warming is actually happening: “No one is saying that climate isn’t changing,” he said. (A lot of people are saying that, actually, but they’re wrong.)
However, Gutfeld veered off track when he suggested the gradual cooking of the planet is a good thing.
“More people die from cold weather than warm weather,” he said. “So if you’re going to just use the ultimate variable, which is life span, you would be happy if the planet gets slightly warmer, because that makes areas more livable for people. People don’t live in frozen areas. They live in warm areas.”
And getting warmer. September is capping a record-breaking summer in the Northern Hemisphere. This year is on course to be the second hottest on record.
“Scientists blame ever warming human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas with an extra push from a natural El Nino,” an Associated Press article noted this week.
In short, humanity’s runaway use of fossil fuels is adding too much heat-trapping carbon dioxide to the Earth’s atmosphere (the so-called greenhouse effect), making the planet warmer than it should be and contributing to all manner of deadly extreme weather and destructive environmental loss.
Gutfeld also falsely asserted that scientists who talk about the realities of climate change “never tell you” the ice measurements “around the globe.”
According to a NASA report on two-thirds of the world’s fresh water stored by ice sheets, Antarctica is losing about 150 billion tons of ice mass per year, and Greenland is losing 270 billion tons annually.
Some people on X, formerly known as Twitter, aired their rebuttals to Gutfeld’s claims as well.