Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., made a “misleading” claim about climate change in her first speech as a presidential candidate, the The Daily Caller reported Monday.
“Everybody here knows from wildfires in the west to hurricanes in the east to floods and droughts in the heartland, but we’re not going to buy the lie, we’re going to act based on science fact, not science fiction,” Harris said during a speech at a rally in Oakland, California, on Sunday, according to USA Today.
The Daily Caller questioned whether Harris dipped into science fiction with that statement, citing the fourth National Climate Assessment, which the website claims found little evidence that climate change affects natural disasters.
However, the report does state that “the effect of human-induced climate change is combined with natural variations and can compound or inhibit the realized severity of any given extreme weather event,” and that “both anthropogenic climate change and the legacy of land use/management have an influence on U.S. wildfires and are subtly and inextricably intertwined.”
The report notes that there is “low to medium confidence for a detectable human climate change contribution in the western United States based on existing studies.”
As for hurricanes and tropical storms, “there is broad agreement that human factors have had an impact on the observed oceanic and atmospheric variability in the North Atlantic, and there is medium confidence that this has contributed to the observed increase in hurricane activity since the 1970s.”
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