Biden: Climate skepticism ‘like denying gravity’

Vice President Joe Biden blasted climate change skeptics like Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), saying their opinion is akin to denying gravity.

In an interview the HBO series “Vice” released Friday in advance of the premiere of its third season, Biden said it’s increasingly difficult for climate skeptics to intelligently argue their case.

{mosads}“I think it’s close to mindless. I think it’s like, you know, almost like denying gravity now,” Biden told host Shane Smith when he asked about Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a high-profile skeptic who called climate change “the greatest hoax” perpetrated on mankind.

“The willing suspension of disbelief can only be sustained so long,” he continued. “The expression my dad used to always use is ‘reality has a way of intruding.’”

Nearly all congressional Republicans agree with Inhofe that greenhouse gases caused by human activity has little or no effect on the climate.

But Inhofe has deliberately been very vocal about the issue. Last month, for example, he threw a snowball on the Senate floor, arguing that the “very unseasonable” cold weather serves is evidence against the scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming.

Biden said 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, and its impact in New York, helps make the case for human-caused climate change.

“All of the sudden, people who were saying it couldn’t happen, they’re now knowing, they have to plan for another one of these storms, and another, and another, and another,” he said.

He also pointed to make financial institutions like Goldman Sachs who are accounting for climate change in their finances.

“When the financial institutions of America began to price in the cost of carbon for the cost of doing business, you know it’s reality.”