Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) said at the 13th International Conference on Climate Change on Thursday in Washington, DC, that he has as much expertise as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) or even Prince Charles when it comes to predicting the planet’s future.

Ocasio-Cortez has said we have 12 years to address climate change before disaster hit, and the prince has weighed in with doomsday predictions that range from 18 months to as many as 35 years until catastrophic events unfold.

McClintock said his prediction is based on a planet that has survived a changing climate for a very long time.

“I suppose I have as much authority as either of them to make predictions so I’ll give us another four and a half billion years, which is the amount of time the climate’s already been changing on the planet,” McClintock said to an appreciative crowd at the Heartland Institute’s convention featuring climate scientists and other experts who spent the day making the case against a manmade climate crisis.

McClintock, who is the ranking member on the House Natural Resources Committee’s Subcommittee on Water, Ocean and Wildlife, said that when the Democrats became the majority party in the 2018 midterm elections they were eager to showcase climate change.

“So when the Democrats began holding hearings and Heartland Institute scholars began showing up and an actual debate began to unfold, our friends on the left seemed to have lost a lot of their interest in those hearings,” McClintock said, adding that he sees that as a positive development.

“They gave us a critical opportunity to engage them on the actual science behind their apocalyptic predictions and they didn’t like where it leads,” McClintock said.

McClintock said despite the humor to be found in the “hysteria” on the left, it calls for serious pushback:

This would be amusing except that it continues to drive public policy despite the failure of every one of their predictions and forecasts to coincide with the actual data we’ve accumulated since this nonsense began. We’ve allowed ourselves once again to be thrown into panic from forces that have been at work shaping our planet since it formed.

McClintock said climate change fear-mongering dates back to the 1970s when both Newsweek and the Washington Post reported on the dangers of an impending new Ice Age.

And that even today the left is ignoring the science that contradicts their apocalyptic predictions.

“The left loves to call us climate change deniers,” McClintock said. “The fact is they deny the science of climate change — the science that documents dramatic changes in climate throughout the epochs that long predate the appearance of mankind.”

Some of the speakers who took part in the conference and presented evidence to refute much of the United Nations claims on climate change that are embraced by Ocasio-Cortez and others included Roy Spencer, Roger Bezdek, Myron Ebell, Patrick Michaels, and Lord Christopher Monckton, former adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and a mathematician who has published in peer-reviewed climate journals.

McClintock concluded his remarks at the conference by praising all of the scientists and others at the event.

“Those future generations to come will remember with gratitude and admiration that there were organizations like Heartland and faithful servants of true science as those who are gathered here today willing to endure the injustices and excesses of political demagoguery to lead us out of the darkness of this hysteria and into the light of the bright future that our advancing technology and freedom can and will deliver if we let them,” McClintock said.

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