Ron Johnson on his past false claim that Greenland was once green: “I have no idea”

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His. Ron JohnsonRonald (Ron) Harold Johnson The Hill’s Morning Report – Biden: Back to the future on immigration, Afghanistan and Iran’s Democrats promise to be “bold”, with or without GOP Johnson, Grassley’s indecision freezes key races of the Senate MORE (R-Wis.) He still seemed skeptical about the origins of the Greenland name in an interview published Monday where he was asked about the inaccurate claims of the past he made about the country’s etymology years ago.

In an interview published Monday by The New York Times, Johnson was asked about the comments he made during the 2010 campaign in which he said Greenland was called because “it was actually green at some point.”

“I might be wrong, but this has always been my assumption that, at some point, those early explorers saw green,” Johnson told the Times. “I have no idea.”

In his 2010 comments, Johnson attempted to refer to an inaccurate portrait of Greenland’s history as a way to dismiss climate change.

“You know, there’s a reason Greenland was called Greenland,” Johnson reported at the time to local media. “In fact, it was green at one point. And it’s been, as you know, since it’s much whiter now, so we’ve experienced climate change over geological time. ”

As the Times notes, the land was given the name Greenland after explorer Erik The Red began calling the island by its name in an attempt to bring more settlers to the area.

Johnson had reportedly made the inaccurate remark, while also claiming that climate change was caused by sunspots rather than by human activity.

According to a report published by Scientific American the year before Johnson’s statements, the claim about sunspots, in particular, occurred because a number of people who denied the notion of humans causing climate change had blamed similarly sunspots from global warming.

While the publication, the nation’s oldest continuously published journal, noted in its coverage that “many” climate scientists agreed that sunspots could also contribute to climate change, it also noted that a “large majority it considers it very minimal and attributes the warming of the Earth mainly to the emissions of the industrial activity, and have available thousands of studies reviewed by endorsed by this affirmation ”.

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