This story was originally published by Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
WASHINGTON — The Senate’s most vocal critic of the scientific consensus on climate change, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, tossed a snowball on the Senate floor Thursday as part of his case for why global warming is a hoax.
Inhofe, who wrote the book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, took to the floor to decry the “hysteria on global warming.”
“In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, ‘You know what this is?'” he said, holding up a snowball. “It’s a snowball, from outside here. So it’s very, very cold out. Very unseasonable.”
“Catch this,” he said to the presiding officer, tossing the blob of snow.
Inhofe went on to list the recent cold temperatures across parts of the United States, which included 67 new record lows earlier this week according to the National Weather Service, as evidence that global warming claims are overhyped. “We hear the perpetual headline that 2014 has been the warmest year on record. But now the script has flipped.”
Despite the record lows in some parts of the country, the nation overall has been experiencing a warmer than average winter.
