"Hi, I'm Scott Brown, and I'll say whatever will give me the most votes when it comes to climate change."
Former Sen. Scott Brown has two opinions about whether scientists are right or wrong about anthropogenic global warming. In Brown's take on the subject, they're right or they're wrong—depending on where and when Brown is campaigning.
At a Republican Senate primary debate in New Hampshire Saturday, Brown replied, "No," when asked, "Do you believe that the theory of man-made climate change has been scientifically proven?"
That wasn't his view back in 2012 when he was debating Elizabeth Warren in the contest for the Massachusetts. Er...let me rephrase that. That wasn't the view he expressed in that debate when he apparently calculated it would not be helpful in Massachusetts to tie himself to the deniers who—because they are ignoramuses or puppets—parrot the claims of fossil-fuel fools that human-caused global warming is not real and therefore requires no efforts to deal with it. In debating Warren, Scott replied to a question about whether climate change is real and, if so, what government should do about it:
"Yes, yes I do," Brown said. "I absolutely believe that climate change is real and I believe there's a combination between man-made and natural. That being said one of the biggest things we could do is get an energy policy and we don't have one."
He gave an answer more in tune with climate "skeptics" in 2009 in his contest with Martha Coakley for the Massachusetts Senate seat he won in 2009: "I [have] said the climate is always changing." He added, "The question I have is, is it man-made, or does it just happen naturally?" A climate skeptic is a denier who maintains the pretense of having a scientific outlook but rejects the scientific evidence on the grounds of argle bargle.
As a consequence of Brown's flip-floppery, NextGen Climate, the advocacy group backed by billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer, began running ads against Brown last week:
“New Hampshire voters see Scott Brown for what he is: someone more interested in his own political career than in the issues that matter to Granite State voters,” said Pete Kavanaugh, the New Hampshire director for NextGen, in a statement.
“From healthcare reform to immigration to a woman’s right to choose and now to climate change, Scott Brown can’t make up his mind about what he believes.”
If he couldn't make up his mind, that would be bad enough. The truth is that whatever Brown actually believes about global warming, he doesn't care enough about it to treat it as a serious subject. For him and his campaign consultants, it's just one more fuzzy bullet point to be "adjusted" depending on the audience.
