US Congressman blames climate change on falling rocks.

It seems to me that climate change sceptics resemble car drivers who deliberately ignore car engine warning lights, not because they don't believe there is something wrong but because they are trying to avoid the cost of fixing it.

But there are  some sceptics who are clearly bonkers 

North Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks is making headlines again for blaming sea level rise on rocks falling into the ocean and silt washing from major rivers.
Brooks was one of several Republican lawmakers sparring with a climate scientist at a Wednesday hearing of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.
Included in the arguing were Republicans Lamar Smith of Texas, the committee's chairman, and California's Dana Rohrabacher, but the websites for  Science and Esquire used Brooks' picture to illustrate their coverage.

 Brooks was quoted saying, 

"Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up." He referred to erosion on the California coastline and England's White Cliffs of Dover and silt from the Mississippi and Nile rivers.

Brooks also said Antarctic ice is growing, not shrinking, and that statement was challenged by Philip Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts and former senior adviser to the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Duffy cited NASA as one of his sources, and Brooks replied that,

 "I've got a NASA base in my district and, apparently, they're telling you one thing and me a different thing."

Brooks spoke at greater length Thursday afternoon between votes on the House floor. 

"But if you're talking a shorter historical time span," Brooks said, "you're going to have great fluctuations up and down due to the quantities of ice that exist on a planet." In an ice age, sea levels drop significantly, he said.
The oceans "are always rising," Brooks said, except during times of ice buildup that offset erosion. Look at the "huge alluvial planes that exist around the great rivers like the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Mekong, the Danube, the Yangtze and you'll see these huge alluvial planes made up entirely of erosion,". 

Brooks disagreed with Duffy during the hearing about whether Antarctic ice is growing or shrinking. Duffy said satellite records "clearly" show shrinkage and a speedup of that shrinkage.

Brooks questioned Duffy's data, and Duffy said it came from the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration." That's when Brooks mentioned the NASA base in his district and said it was telling him something different.

"You've got to make sure you're careful in terminology," Brooks said later Thursday. "I'm talking ice quantity. He's talking about surface area. Two entirely different things."

Brooks said the

"total ice quantity, which is what affects sea levels, has been increasing. The Antarctica sea ice varies from year to year and from decade to decade." The ice is growing in quantity on the interior of Antarctica, he said. 
"I never said anything about Antarctic sea ice, but that's the comparison they make," Brooks said of the press. "I'm talking about Antarctica ice, which is both the sea ice and the interior of Antarctica. And the interior is where the vast majority of ice is."
"I've never been skeptical of climate change," Brooks said. "The climate is always changing. The planet is always either heating up or cooling down. It is very rarely constant."

Brooks was asked about the theory that current warming is a threat and human activity is part of its cause. 

"In the late '60s and early '70s, the climate scare was cooling, that we're going to enter into a new ice age...," Brooks said. "They turned out to be wrong."
"What I'm trying to establish is that a lot of these climatologists have no idea what they're really talking about," Brooks said, "and it's because we have not had a long enough period time with exact scientific measurement to know what the climate's going to be like 50 years from now or 100 years from now."
Brooks said studies and projections made in the 1990s by "these so-called climatologists" were almost all wrong "on the hot side as to where we would be in 2018." Over 90 percent were wrong, he said.

The bottom line

"The bottom line is nobody is smart enough to know with the evidence we have and the relatively small time frame we have - 50 years in the history of the planet. That's just not enough information with which to make accurate predictions."

So what is motivating scientists to say the Earth is dangerously warming?

"Money," Brooks said. "Money to invest in a certain kind of resources where you might have a financial interest. There's also politics as you're trying to cobble together the votes to win an election, that's probably part of it, too."

Ok we have more than our fair share of climate change deniers on these islands only recently the broadcasting watchdog has ruled. that the BBC Radio 4 broke accuracy rules by failing to sufficiently challenge the climate change denier Nigel Lawson’s controversial claims in an interview, the broadcasting watchdog has ruled. Lord Lawson appeared on a Radio 4 programme last summer denying the concept of climate change, which prompted complaints from the Green party and the prominent scientists Brian Cox and Jim Al-Khalili, who said it was “irresponsible and highly misleading” to imply there was still a debate around the science supporting it.

Lawson, a former chancellor of the exchequer in Margaret Thatcher’s government, made claims including that “all the experts say there hasn’t been” an increase in extreme weather events. He said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “concedes” this, and that, according to official figures, “during this past 10 years … average world temperature has slightly declined”.
Ofcom received two complaints that the interview broke the UK broadcasting rule 5.1, which states that “news, in whatever form, must be reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality”.

“Neither statement was correct, or sufficiently challenged during the interview or subsequently during the programme,” said the Ofcom ruling.

The BBC said it had publicly acknowledged that “some of Lord Lawson’s statements went beyond the intended scope of the interview and he was allowed to make inaccurate assertions which should have been challenged”.
Ofcom was not impressed that a previous appearance on the Today programme in 2014 by Lawson, who founded the Global Warming Policy Foundation, resulted in an internal BBC investigation and ruling that found the same failure to properly challenge his views.

“We found that statements made about the science of climate change were not challenged sufficiently during this interview, which meant the programme was not duly accurate,” said a spokeswoman for Ofcom. “We’ve told the BBC we are concerned that this was the second incident of this

How much longer will the Red  Warning Light on the earths dashboard, before we start listing to the experts and not polticians with crackpot theories.