NASA GISS global land-ocean temperature averages from 1880 thru 2015

Earlier this week, Sen. Marco Rubio appeared in a town hall with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. I found Rubio to be insightful, even deep on occasion. He was an adept verbal sprinter at every question, some from Todd and many from the audience, and that included some tough, unscripted ones. Which means the man is plenty smart enough to read basic NASA temperature tables or understand a chart of them. But at this week’s GOP debate, here’s what we actually got:

"Sure the climate is changing, and one of the reasons is because the climate has always been changing," he said. "There has never been a time when the climate was not changing." South Florida's problem, he said, is that it was built on a swamp, and because "there are higher sea levels, or whatever is happening." "I have long supported mitigation efforts, but as far as a law that we can pass in Washington to change the weather, there's no such thing," he said. “On the contrary, there are laws they want to us pass that would be devastating for our economy," he insisted, citing the Obama administration's regulations on power plant emissions.

That first sentence has grown tiresome and needs to be corrected going forward by every journalist who hears it in an answer. Because the unstated (and oft stated) finish goes something like, “so, we can’t do anything about it and should stop caring.” Which is like saying sure, breathing heavy smoke on a regular basis has always caused cancer and heart disease, there has never been a time when that was safe. So why worry about cigarettes? For that matter, epidemics have come and gone for eons, why worry about Ebola?