'The weight of the evidence is that most of it ... is because of natural causes,' he said. | REUTERS TPaw: Climate change 'natural'

Tim Pawlenty is chalking up global warming almost entirely to natural causes.

The Republican presidential candidate who once cut commercials advocating for cap-and-trade legislation while serving as Minnesota governor told The Miami Herald this week that he doesn't believe in the science attributing climate change to humans.


"The weight of the evidence is that most of it, maybe all of it, is because of natural causes," Pawlenty said in an interview published Wednesday. "But to the extent there is some element of human behavior causing some of it — that’s what the scientific debate is about. That’s why we’ve seen all this back and forth between some of those prominent scientists in the world arguing about that very point.”

Pressed to explain how his view squares with scientific research concluding human activities are very likely to blame for the warming planet, Pawlenty replied, “There’s lots of layers to it. But at least as to any potential man-made contribution to it, it’s fair to say the science is in dispute.

"There’s a lot of people who say the majority of the scientists think this way," he added. "And there’s a minority that way. And you count the number of scientists versus the quality of scientists and the like. But I think it’s fair to say that, as to whether and how much — if any — is attributable to human behavior, there’s dispute and controversy over it."

GOP White House contenders are uniformly critical these days of cap-and-trade policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions, even though many of them, including Pawlenty, Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney, previously supported the concept.

On the science, however, Republican candidates have been all over the map.

Appearing in June on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, Rick Santorum called climate change "junk science." Limbaugh a few days earlier had trashed Romney's chances for the GOP nomination after he said he believed in the science that finds humans have contributed to climate change.

Speaking last week at a Republicans for Environmental Protection banquet in Washington, Huntsman stuck to his guns on global warming science. "Conservation is conservative,” he said. “I'm not ashamed to be a conservationist. I also believe that science should be driving our discussion on climate change."

According to a study recently posted online in the journal Global Environmental Change, the climate skeptics among the GOP presidential candidates have an eager audience.

The report — Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States — tracked a decade of Gallup polls to conclude that conservative white males are significantly more likely to deny global warming science than other demographics.

Skeptics are even more numerous among the white males who report that they understand the issue well, which Michigan State University’s Aaron McCright and Oklahoma State University’s Riley Dunlap wrote reflects “a system-justifying tendency.”

Fueling the skepticism, the researchers added, are conservative think tanks and media, corporations and industry associations that have led the opposition to climate science and policy since the late 1980s.

"The results presented here show that conservative white males in the general public have become a very receptive audience for these efforts,” they wrote. “When mobilized, these conservative white males may constitute a key vector of climate change denial in their own right via their online and offline social networks and through participation in various protest and campaigning events."

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 11:49 a.m. on August 4, 2011.