Pence Says the Jury's Still Out on Climate Change While Touring Hurricane Michael Wreckage

Vice President Mike Pence visited Georgia on Tuesday, where he surveyed damage done by Hurricane Michael, which has already killed 26 people, and caused billions of dollars worth of damage to date. There, after seeing firsthand just a fraction of the devastation wrought by America’s most recent mega-storm, Pence repeated the lie that we don’t know what causes climate change.

“As the president has said, the climate is changing but what the causes of that are, are yet to be seen,” Pence told reporters. “The reality is it’s some of the worst storms that have ever affected this area were 50 and 100 years ago.”

Pence’s statement comes just days after a massive study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that humanity has literally one decade to act on climate change before we, as a species (and especially the poorest among us) are irrevocably fucked. But, hey, noted climatologist and human q-tip Mike Pence thinks the jury is still out!

Of course, Pence’s stance is entirely in keeping with the extinction-level denial going on across the Trump administration, including from the president himself, who just this past Sunday downplayed the catastrophic climate change happening literally before our very eyes, by claiming that scientists desperately ringing the alarms “have a very big political agenda.”

In any case, if seeing the aftermath of a disaster caused by a hurricane that leapt from a Category 1 to a Category 4 storm essentially overnight isn’t “yet to be seen” enough for Mike Pence, he can take solace in the fact that by the time he’s ready to admit that humanity is well and truly screwed, we’ll all be dead anyway.