Climate change denial comes in many forms, but it takes an especially absurd tone when it’s adapted to the rhetoric of religious fanatics. When it’s made the subject of a whole sermon, the truth can do more contortions than a gymnast.
During a sermon last Sunday at his church, far-right pastor Rodney Howard-Browne told his congregation that climate change is a “total fabrication. How does he know this? His “Eskimo friends” told him.
Howard-Browne, who was one of the religious leaders who laid hands on President Trump in the Oval Office last year, theorized that a recent natural disasters were the result of a “mini ice age.”
In a video flagged by Right Wing Watch, he declared that most people “who talk about global warming have no clue what they are talking about.”
“[Global warming] is all a total fabrication and garbage,” he said. “The earth is actually not heating, it’s actually cooling, sorry to tell you, because everything functions off the activity of the sun. Right now the sun’s activity is at a minimum and that is what they call a Grand Solar Minimum.”
He then regurgitated the familiar conspiracy-laden argument that says climate change is just a ruse for politicians to impose a tax to fund a one-world government.
“I’ve got news for you: the ice caps are not melting,” he continued. “In actual fact, the arctic ice is at an all time high right now. You say, ‘Why do you say that?’ Because I have Eskimo friends. I talk to my Eskimo friends probably three times a week.”
“Some will say, ‘The polar bears are dying.’ They are not dying. There are more polar bears … they don’t even know what to do with the polar bears,” he said, recounting how his Eskimo friend “texted” him to say, “‘I’m looking at a polar bear through my window right now.’”
“Yeah, we we saw a picture of a staving polar bear,” he went on, apparently referring to a famously heart-wrenching Nat Geo video. “He’s an old bear that cannot hunt any more and National Geographic was there to take a picture. When you can’t hunt any more, you get skinny and you get old and you die.”
Watch the video below, via Right Wing Watch:
Featured image via screen grab/YouTube
