North Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks is making headlines again for blaming sea level rise on rocks falling into the ocean and silt washing from major rivers.

Brooks was one of several Republican lawmakers sparring with a climate scientist at a Wednesday hearing of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.

Included in the arguing were Republicans Lamar Smith of Texas, the committee's chairman, and California's Dana Rohrabacher, but the websites for Science and Esquire used Brooks' picture to illustrate their coverage.

"Republican lawmaker: Rocks tumbling into ocean causing sea level rise," read the Science site's headline.

"Is the Human Race Too Dumb to Survive on This Planet?" asked Esquire also featuring Brooks.

"Here's how big a rock you'd have to drop into the ocean to see the rise in sea level happening now," chimed in the Washington Post.

Brooks was quoted saying, "Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up." He referred to erosion on the California coastline and England's White Cliffs of Dover and silt from the Mississippi and Nile rivers.

Brooks also said Antarctic ice is growing, not shrinking, and that statement was challenged by Philip Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts and former senior adviser to the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Duffy cited NASA as one of his sources, and Brooks replied that, "I've got a NASA base in my district and, apparently, they're telling you one thing and me a different thing."

Brooks at length

Brooks spoke at greater length Thursday afternoon between votes on the House floor.

"You put it all together, erosion is the primary cause of sea level rise in the history of our planet," Brooks said, "and these people who say to the contrary may know something about climate but they don't know squat about geology."

"Keep in mind I'm talking millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years, erosion is the primary cause of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of cubic miles of sea displacement that in turn forces the sea levels to rise," he said.

"But if you're talking a shorter historical time span," Brooks said, "you're going to have great fluctuations up and down due to the quantities of ice that exist on a planet." In an ice age, sea levels drop significantly, he said.

The oceans "are always rising," Brooks said, except during times of ice buildup that offset erosion. Look at the "huge alluvial planes that exist around the great rivers like the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Mekong, the Danube, the Yangtze and you'll see these huge alluvial planes made up entirely of erosion," he said.

Brooks disagreed with Duffy during the hearing about whether Antarctic ice is growing or shrinking. Duffy said satellite records "clearly" show shrinkage and a speedup of that shrinkage.

Brooks questioned Duffy's data, and Duffy said it came from the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration." That's when Brooks mentioned the NASA base in his district and said it was telling him something different.

Wrong in the '60s

"You've got to make sure you're careful in terminology," Brooks said later Thursday. "I'm talking ice quantity. He's talking about surface area. Two entirely different things."

Brooks said the "total ice quantity, which is what affects sea levels, has been increasing. The Antarctica sea ice varies from year to year and from decade to decade." The ice is growing in quantity on the interior of Antarctica, he said.

"I never said anything about Antarctic sea ice, but that's the comparison they make," Brooks said of the press. "I'm talking about Antarctica ice, which is both the sea ice and the interior of Antarctica. And the interior is where the vast majority of ice is."

"I've never been skeptical of climate change," Brooks said. "The climate is always changing. The planet is always either heating up or cooling down. It is very rarely constant."

Brooks was asked about the theory that current warming is a threat and human activity is part of its cause. "In the late '60s and early '70s, the climate scare was cooling, that we're going to enter into a new ice age...," Brooks said. "They turned out to be wrong."

"What I'm trying to establish is that a lot of these climatologists have no idea what they're really talking about," Brooks said, "and it's because we have not had a long enough period time with exact scientific measurement to know what the climate's going to be like 50 years from now or 100 years from now."

Brooks said studies and projections made in the 1990s by "these so-called climatologists" were almost all wrong "on the hot side as to where we would be in 2018." Over 90 percent were wrong, he said.

The bottom line

"The bottom line is nobody is smart enough to know with the evidence we have and the relatively small time frame we have - 50 years in the history of the planet. That's just not enough information with which to make accurate predictions."

So what is motivating scientists to say the Earth is dangerously warming?

"Money," Brooks said. "Money to invest in a certain kind of resources where you might have a financial interest. There's also politics as you're trying to cobble together the votes to win an election, that's probably part of it, too."