NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine attributes his recent shift on the mankind’s impact on climate change to reading and listening to experts on the issue.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Bridenstine said that during his tenure as chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy, he “listened to a lot of testimony. I heard a lot of experts, and I read a lot.”
“I came to the conclusion myself that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that we’ve put a lot of into the atmosphere and therefore we have contributed to the global warming that we’ve seen,” he told the Washington Post. “And we’ve done it in really significant ways.”
Bridenstine, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, was confirmed to lead NASA in April in a narrow 50-49 vote.
He was criticized for lacking scientific credentials and for his past comments questioning the causes of climate change. In a 2013 speech on the House floor, Bridenstine said “global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago.”
Some lawmakers also feared that because Bridenstine is a former congressman, tapping him to lead the space agency would politicize it.
But Bridenstine said in May that he believed human activity is the primary driver of global warming.
“The National Climate Assessment that includes NASA, and it includes the Department of Energy and it includes NOAA, has clearly stated it is extremely likely — is the language they use — that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming,” Bridenstine said during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing. “I have no reason to doubt the science that comes from that.”
[Related: Why millennial Republicans believe in climate change]
