Photo via @Forbes/Twitter
June 9, 2021, 10:13 am
In a bizarre video clip, Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas can be seen asking a representative of the U.S. Forest Service if they or “BLM” could possibly alter the orbit of either the moon or the Earth itself in order to combat climate change after allegedly speaking to a former director of NASA. It only sounds a little crazier than it is, because the “BLM” he was referring to was not the Black Lives Matter movement, but the Bureau of Land Management.
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But still, what?
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“I was informed by the past director of NASA that they have found that the moon’s orbit is changing slightly, and so is the Earth’s orbit around the sun,” he said. “We know there’s been a significant solar flare activity, so is there anything that the National Forest Service or BLM can do to change the course of the moon’s orbit or the Earth’s orbit around the sun?”
It’s safe to assume that the answer is either “no” or “maybe, but doing so would have catastrophic consequences we couldn’t even predict and is better left to sci-fi writers,” but the Forest Service representative went with the safe answer.
“I would have to follow up with you on that one, Mr. Gohmert,” she said.
It’s unclear how Gohmert thinks that the people who manage the stuff on the literal ground of the Earth could alter the orbit of the planet or its moon—even NASA would find that to be a challenge. If it was an attempt to push the idea that the current climate crisis that is creating record-breaking weather events year after year around the globe is not the result of human activity and instead due to minuscule changes in the orbit of the Earth and/or moon, it didn’t quite hit the way he might have hoped.
While the Earth’s orbit does go through a cycle of small changes over tens of thousands of years, known as Milankovitch cycles, that affect the climate, NASA has stressed that this cannot explain the rapid changes our climate is currently undergoing, which span mere decades.
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“Small variations in how Earth moves around our Sun influence our climate over very long timespans, but they can’t account for Earth’s current period of rapid warming,” explains NASA’s climate change blog.
Regardless, trying to artificially mess with these cycles sounds like a worse idea than Jurassic Park, and the public would like Gohmert to follow up with them on what the heck he was even thinking.
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I think he may have attended the vaccination magnet meeting…
https://t.co/aMkBjvnp3I
— Michael Muscato (@michael_muscato) June 9, 2021
*First Published: June 9, 2021, 10:13 am
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