Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), a potential running-mate choice for presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, joined other Democratic Senators yesterday on the Senate floor to attack the Cornwall Alliance, and a few other Virginia-based organizations, in a poor attempt to defend climate alarmism against its critics.

As usual, Kaine’s was an argument rife with logical fallacies—appeals to emotion, straw men, ridicule, oversimplification, and misrepresentation.

The one thing the good Senator forgot to include in his speech was any sound science!

According to Kaine, The Cornwall Alliance is part of a “web of denial,” a “shadow organization,” “bizzaro,” and “greedy.”

Senator Kaine quoted a tiny piece of our Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change (which he didn’t mention was signed by hundreds of scientists, including over 20 climate scientists), in which we had quoted Psalm 19, and then said,

“So somebody is really using Scripture to argue that making our energy production cleaner, safer, cheaper, violates the Christian tenet of caring for the poor?”

No, Senator Kaine, if you read the full Open Letter you will discover that the argument, which includes both science and economics, shows that pushing technologies that arenot currently better for the environment or cheaper (such as wind, solar, and biofuels) hurts those in poverty.

Since Senators Kaine, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and others are banding together to reveal the “web of denial” that appears to be made up only of conservative organizations they claim are funded by ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel corporations that they consider immoral (despite the fact that the energy they provide has been indispensable to lifting and keeping billions of people out of poverty, as Kathleen Hartnett White brilliantly demonstrates in her booklet Fossil Fuels: The Moral Case), what about the “web of denial” created by alarmist organizations—which are funded by renewable energy corporations and governments that stand to gain from climate alarm, and which have been caught exaggerating, fabricating, and falsifying data to support their views, suppressing contrary data, intimidating scientists who disagree, and corrupting the scientific peer-review process?

Senator Kaine claims that 70% of Virginians agree with the “scientific consensus” that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is real and that “it is urgent that we do something about it.”

What “scientific consensus”?

The “97% of scientists” that is the go-to statistic for alarmists has been debunked so thoroughly that it takes serious chutzpah to use it.

That’s denial.

Then there is the fact (observable fact mind you, not computer model) that shows there has been no statistically significant long-term global warming for about the last 19 years.

Yet they deny this too.

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) has increased drastically during that time, so where is the correlation between increased temperature and CO2?

There is none.

No one argues that humans have absolutely no effect on the environment or on potential warming.

What is in question is whether human emissions of CO2 will create temperature increases so drastic as to cause a catastrophe so great as to justify spending trillions of dollars to mitigate it that could be spent instead to lift billions of people out of poverty and the high rates of disease and premature death that invariably accompany it. And right now the only proof alarmists have is computer model projections that are wildly inaccurate, and a hockey stick graph so derided by the scientific community for its inaccuracies as to be utterly worthless.

That’s some serious denial.

To watch the full speech click here. The Cornwall Alliance is mentioned in the second part of the video.

For more information on the dangers of environmental alarmism to people in poverty, go to our website, www.cornwallalliance.org.