Thursday, May 3, 2018

#2007: Jeff Miller

Jefferson Bingham Miller was the U.S. Representative for Florida’s 1st congressional district from 2001 to 2017 and a longstanding opponent of marriage equality. For our purposes, Miller is more interesting for his staunch commitment to climate change denialism and long-debunked denialist gambits: “climate has been changing for a long time. They call it global warming, global cooling [they really didn’t] – now everybody wants to call it climate change […] It changes. It gets hot, it gets cold. It’s done it for as long as we have measured the climate,” and the science isn’t “settled” since it is possible to find people with relevant degrees who say it isn’t (based on demonstrably and strikingly flawed papers), nevermind that the vast majority says it is) and how evidence assessment works. After asserting that the science isn’t settled, which it is on any reasonable understanding of “settled”, Miller then argued that it is, in fact, settled, and that man-made global warming is false. It is false because the dinosaurs died off before humans were around. Therefore current temperature increases cannot be caused by human activity, and we shouldn’t take any political steps to prevent it or mitigate its effects. Then he argued that it is really God who is driving climate change.

Miller is also opposed to the separation of church and state, and has co-sponsored bills that would require Congress to recognize and support Christianity (with, admittedly, a host of other wingnut Congress members). Also: the War on Christmas is totally persecution of Christians in the US.

Diagnosis: Wingnut denialist, conspiracy theorist and moron. Though retired from Congress, he’s still a person of some influence, and should be avoided.

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