Barbara Kirkmeyer
Barbara Kirkmeyer may not have as big a national profile as some of these other politicians, but her climate views are even more extreme. Kirkmeyer, a current Colorado state senator running for one of the state’s open seats in the House of Representatives, told the Colorado Sun in June that “the Earth has been gradually warming since the Little Ice Age,” saying that “to what extent any warming is a result of man-caused activity is unknown.” (That’s very wrong.)
The Colorado Newsline attempted to verify Kirkmeyer’s viewpoints in July, and, according to the paper, got a bit of an earful.
“How old are you?” Alan Philp, a spokesperson for Kirkmeyer’s campaign, asked a reporter in a brief phone interview. “You wouldn’t remember the ’70s. I remember the ’70s, when the scientific consensus was all about global cooling.”
Philp contested the reporter’s characterization of Kirkmeyer “denying” climate science. He claimed that there are “plenty of meteorologists who would say exactly what she said,” falsely using Weather Channel founder John Coleman, who was a climate denier and not a meteorologist, as an example.
In October, the Colorado Sun reported that Kirkmeyer said: “we just don’t know to what extent” humans contribute to climate change (which is categorically untrue). “I’ve never been a climate-change denier,” Kirkmeyer told the paper.
Rating: 6/10. Very old-school, but an impressive double-down.
