Minnesota meteorologist and ecoright crusader Paul Douglas, whom republicEn.org featured earlier this year as an “En-fluential,” points to the scientific data as driving his views on climate change.
“It was the data that tipped me off actually, the weather tipped me off. We’ve always had extremes, but by the late ’90s, early 2000s, it became apparent that weather patterns had shifted so significantly, so far outside the realm of average, that we had entered a new regime, and I was seeing the symptoms of climate change,” Douglas said in a recent interview. “Speaking out about climate change was not something I aspired to. It just came about organically as I looked at the weather and tried to connect the dots.” A self-professed evangelical Republican, he recently partnered with Methodist minister Mitch Hescox to write the book Caring for Creation. “Even if you don’t believe the climate scientists, will you believe meteorologists or ministers? In the end, are you going to believe your own eyes? The symptoms will become, over time, harder and harder to dismiss and deny.”
Douglas intends to give President-elect Donald Trump “space to adapt his worldview” on climate change. “If in fact this becomes a rabid, climate change-denying administration, it will go against the grain of much of what the GOP has done in previous incarnations,” he said, citing the environmental accomplishments of Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Teddy Roosevelt.
“There are still a lot of Teddy Roosevelt conservatives out there who believe that conservation should in fact apply to the very thing that sustains us,” he said.