He's aiming to resuscitate his campaign through his latest appeal to conservatives. Huntsman's skepticism on climate

Jon Huntsman, who slammed Rick Perry over the summer for not trusting scientists on climate change, has now developed his own doubts.

“The scientific community owes us more in terms of a better description of explanation about what might lie beneath all of this. But there’s not information right now to formulate policies in terms of addressing it over all, primarily because it’s a global issue,” the former Utah governor said Tuesday at an appearance at the conservative Heritage Foundation.


Huntsman was at Heritage at the start of a week that’s aiming to resuscitate his campaign through his latest appeal to conservatives through a series of television and radio appearances. With five weeks to go before the New Hampshire primary on which he’s pinned his entire campaign, he’s looking to finally gain the traction that to date almost every other candidate in the field has gotten but him.

Huntsman’s not the only one being pressed on this issue — Newt Gingrich has been battling critics for days over his record on cap-and-trade, and offered a careful defense Tuesday on Glenn Beck’s radio show, saying only “I believe in the environment in general.” Mitt Romney’s environmental record has also been brought up as an issue in the past.

Huntsman, though, had expressed his own views on his rivals bluntly over Twitter in August, writing, “To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”

Huntsman later said Perry’s skepticism on climate change was “a serious problem,” to ABC’s Jake Tapper, adding, “The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party — the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012.”

But Huntsman said his most recent comments were not a shift from his earlier comments.

“I’m not changing that at all. I still say that,” Huntsman said. “I say because of that — I’m not a physicist, I’m not a scientist. I tend to defer to those who do it for a living. I’d be prepared to take it out of the political milieu and put it into the scientific milieu.”

However, Huntsman explained, “there are questions about the validity of the science — evidence by one university over in Scotland recently,” apparently alluding to the “Climategate 2.0” emails from England’s East Anglia University released last month.

Climate scientists quoted in those messages, as well as proponents of action on climate change, have scoffed at the critics’ use of those emails, saying they rely on scientific terminology that sounds incriminating out of context.

Huntsman said he still supports the idea of a scientific consensus but is not yet endorsing the conclusion that climate change is happening and caused by human activity.

“I think the onus is on the scientific community to provide more in the way of information, to help clarify the situation. That’s all,” he added. “But do I defer to science and those who happen to do this for a living? Yeah, I do, as I do on issues like cancer, for example.”

That uncertainty makes taking on climate change difficult, Huntsman said.

“I think our goals need to follow some recognition of science by all of the major emitters, and I’m not sure that is the case today and therefore our goals become a little problematic,” he said after being asked about ongoing international climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa.

Major emitters like China and India are not looking at the same scientific materials as the U.S., he argued, and if there’s no international coordination then any attempt to counter climate change is pointless.

“Before we start talking about goals in a broader sense, I think there has to be some recognition of some sort of harmonized approach to reading science,” he said. “We’re not to that point yet and I think it will be a while before we get to that point.”

Huntsman said his skepticism on climate change didn’t extent to all science.

“Do I defer to science and happen to do this for a living? I do, as I do on issues like cancer for example,” he added. Huntsman said he would favor letting the debate “play out within the scientific community.”