GOP Senate candidate: Rain shows climate ‘changes all the time’

The Republican Senate candidate in West Virginia says she misspoke during a Tuesday night debate when she said she didn’t believe in climate change, and is pointing to the rain as evidence that conditions are shifting “all the time.”

“Is the climate changing? Yes, it’s changing, it changes all the time, we heard it raining out there,” Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) told reporters. “I’m sure humans are contributing to it.”

{mosads}Capito, who could become the first Republican senator elected from West Virginia in decades, initially said in a Tuesday night debate that she did not believe in man-made climate change.

But speaking with reporters afterward, she said she misspoke, and referred to the weather in Charleston, W.Va., to demonstrate her point, according to The Charleston Gazette.

It is unclear whether Capito meant that human activity causes weather events such as rain.

President Obama’s efforts to reduce climate change through regulations are deeply controversial in West Virginia, one of the top coal-producing states in the country.

Capito’s Democratic opponent for the Senate seat, Natalie Tennant, opposes Obama’s environmental policies that Republicans say amount to a “war on coal.”  Tennant said she does believe in human-induced climate change.

Meteorologists and climate scientists have criticized climate change skeptics who conflate weather and climate. They say that while climate change could change weather characteristics or increase extreme weather events, no individual event can prove or disprove climate change.