Chief Doubts Consensus View of Climate Change -<br />By CORAL DAVENPORTMARCH 9, 2017<br />WASHINGTON — Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on Thursday<br />that carbon dioxide was not a primary contributor to global warming, a statement at odds with the established scientific consensus on climate change.<br />Asked his views on the role of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas produced by burning fossil fuels, in increasing global warming, Mr. Pruitt said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box”<br />that “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so, no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”<br />“But we don’t know that yet,” he added.<br />A report in 2013 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of about 2,000 international scientists<br />that reviews and summarizes climate science, found it to be “extremely likely” that more than half the global warming that occurred from 1951 to 2010 was a consequence of human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.<br />In addition to putting him at odds with the consensus of climate scientists, Mr. Pruitt’s remarks also raise the possibility that, as the Trump administration<br />moves forward with unwinding Mr. Obama’s climate change regulations, it could put the administration in violation of federal law.<br />A January report by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded, “The planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit<br />(1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.”<br />Benjamin D. Santer, a climate researcher at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said, “Mr.
