Inhofe hurls snowball on Senate floor

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) threw a snowball on the Senate floor Thursday in an effort to disprove what he sees as alarmist conclusions about man-made climate change.

Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, said the snowball was from outside in Washington, which he used to argue against claims that the earth’s temperature is rising due to greenhouse gas emissions.

{mosads}“In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, do you know what this is,” Inhofe said to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who was presiding over the Senate’s debate, as he removed the snowball from a plastic bag.

“It’s a snowball. And it’s just from outside here. So it’s very, very cold out. Very unseasonable.”

He then warned Cassidy before throwing the snowball at him.

An Inhofe aide said the snowball was caught by a congressional page.

“We hear the perpetual headline that 2014 has been the warmest year on record,” he said, referring to a report last month from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“But now the script has flipped,” he said of the unseasonably cold weather.

Inhofe later realized that Senate rules require unanimous consent to use props during debate. He retroactively asked for unanimous consent to use the snowball, which Cassidy granted.

Inhofe listed many news stories and studies over recent decades that he said used alarmism to scare the American people about extreme weather.

“This is something that has been happening over a long period of time,” he said. “And every time it does, everyone tries to say that the world’s coming to an end and somehow man is important and so powerful that he can change that.”

Inhofe also chided Obama for his recent remarks that climate change is a greater threat to most Americans than terrorism.

He listed various terrorist attacks of recent decades to demonstrate the atrocity of the United States’ enemies, both terrorists and nations like Russia and North Korea.

“It’s just another illustration that the president and his administration are detached from the realities that we are facing today and into the future,” he said. “His repeated failure to understand the real threat to our national security and his inability to establish a coherent national security strategy has put this nation at a level of risk that has been unknown for decades.”

Inhofe, one of the Senate’s most vocal skeptics of climate change, convinced all but one Republican in the Senate earlier this month to vote for an amendment saying that climate change is real.

He saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate his position that the earth’s climate has always changed, and man-made emissions have little impact.