Jerry Brown slams climate skeptics as 'troglodytes' at Vatican conference

California Gov. Jerry Brown slammed global warming deniers in a keynote speech on Tuesday at a Vatican conference of environmentally friendly mayors. Politicians running for office who do not accept climate change as real are “troglodytes,” he said, according to The Associated Press.

Deniers of climate change are spending “billions on trying to keep from office people such as yourselves and elect troglodytes and other deniers of the obvious science,” the Democratic governor said, according to the AP.


Brown, whose state has set the most stringent regulations on greenhouse gas emissions in North America, blasted climate deniers for their “fierce opposition and blind inertia” and their attempts to “falsify the scientific record” to persuade scientists, politicians and the American people that global warming does not exist.

The governor, who spent roughly four years in a Jesuit seminary in the late 1950s, reportedly told the mayors in attendance that they should be vigilant and active in opposing those who deny the existence of climate change caused by humans.

A declaration set to be signed by some five dozen mayors in attendance seen by the AP proclaims that “human-induced climate change is a scientific reality and its effective control is a moral imperative for humanity.”

It’s not the first time Brown has hurled the “troglodyte” insult at political opponents.

In March, for example, he ripped the positions of Republican governors and attorneys general challenging President Barack Obama’s immigration executive actions as “at best troglodyte, and at worst, un-Christian.”

Speaking at a climate change conference in Toronto earlier this month, Brown said that “[w]e have a lot of troglodytes south of the border.”