Obama Attacks ‘Climate Deniers’ For Wasting Time Debating ‘Fact’

President Obama took time in his Friday speech at a California Wal-Mart to bash “climate deniers” for obstructing him by debating the science behind man-made global warming.

“So unfortunately, inside of Washington we’ve still got some climate deniers who shout loud, but they’re wasting everybody’s time on a settled debate,” Obama said, doubling down on remarks made during his State of the Union Address this year by adding that, “Climate change is a fact.”

“Here in California, you’ve seen these effects firsthand,” Obama told the audience at a Mountain View Wal-Mart. “You know what’s happening. And increasingly, more and more Americans do — including, by the way, many Republicans outside of Washington.”

Obama’s speech to announce more executive orders to promote solar energy development and energy efficiency subsidies comes just days after the White House released the third National Climate Assessment (NCA).

The NCA claimed that global warming was already happening and had caused the U.S. to warm about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895. The report also claimed that temperatures could increase another 4 degrees Fahrenheit and sea levels could rise 4 feet in the coming decades if no action is taken.

“Hundreds of scientists, experts and businesses, not-for-profits, local communities all contributed over the course of four years,” Obama said. “What they found was unequivocally that climate change is not some far-off problem in the future. It’s happening now. It’s causing hardship now.”

Obama stressed that storms, floods and droughts — like the one California is currently experiencing — have been made more severe by rising global temperatures, a talking point the administration has been pushing hard in the last year.

The NCA also warned that global warming was making weather more extreme, saying that risks “associated with extreme events like hurricanes are increasing.” But this contradicts data from governmental sources and independent researchers.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that there “is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century” and current data shows “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century. … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.”

The IPCC also noted “there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale” adding “that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century due to lack of direct observations, geographical inconsistencies in the trends.”

“Actually: US hurricane landfalls have decreased by ~25% since 1900,” said Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., a climate scientist with the University of Colorado.

Pielke has presented extensive evidence that weather has not gotten more extreme because of global warming.

“It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally,” Dr. Pielke told the Senate last summer. “It is further incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.”

“Hurricanes have not increased in the U.S. in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since at least 1900,” Pielke added. “The same holds for tropical cyclones globally since at least 1970.”

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