Noah Rothman Battles Morning Joe on Climate Report: Projections Should Be Looked at ‘With Skepticism’

A Morning Joe panel got heated on Tuesday after conservative writer Noah Rothman argued for being skeptical when basing policy on long-term projections about climate change.

Outlining conservative positions on global warming, Rothman, an editor for Commentary, said: “that a projection of specific impacts is something that we should look on with skepticism.”

“Because it has been proven in the past that these projections of very specific impacts have failed to meet expectations,” he said, giving examples of environmental studies proven wrong.

“I would submit that’s a pretty big gamble to take,” Mike Barnicle said. He asked if Rothman is “willing to gamble” his children’s future. “Because they’re going to be either paying the bill for our fault for not dealing with this or they’re going to be living lives that are nowhere near the quality of life that we have.”

Rothman countered such a response to climate change “could produce hysteria.”

“Alternatively, it could produce government policy that tries to address this issue,” BBC anchor Katty Kay said. “You’re right that there are individual numbers that have been disputed and that should deserve scrutiny. But the overwhelming trajectory of the scientific evidence all points to the same thing, which is that the globe is warming, and that it is majority manmade, and that we have to do something urgently within the next decade or two decades to address it and bring down the rate of warming.”

“That is what is not happening,” she added.

“We base policy on projections all the time outside of climate,” Daily Beast politics editor Sam Stein said. “We do projections on military stuff, on health care costs, on economic matters all the time. And we base policy around that. So it’s not abnormal to do something like that.”

“And these aren’t just projections — there are data points already in the books,” he said. Citing U.S. response to the migrant caravan, Stein added, “Why can’t we take short-term steps to mitigate long-term losses is all that people are saying.”

Watch Rothman’s response above, via MSNBC.