Science Quote by Uberto Crescenti

The ellipses do a lot of work here: they signal a leap from a measured-sounding premise (climate varies naturally; geology records that) to a political act (signing a Senate report) that’s meant to certify skepticism as “scientific” dissent. Crescenti’s intent isn’t to map the full climate system; it’s to reposition authority. By invoking “many geological data,” he borrows the cultural prestige of deep time to imply that current warming is just another swing of Earth’s long, self-correcting pendulum. It’s a classic rhetorical move: widen the timeline until human influence looks trivial.

The subtext is less about evidence than about jurisdiction. “Natural causes” becomes a way of saying: don’t regulate, don’t panic, don’t blame industry. And “very glad to sign” reads like a scientist stepping onto a stage built by policymakers. That matters, because the U.S. Senate’s “report of scientists against” is a deliberately adversarial framing; science normally argues in degrees of confidence, not manifestos “against” a theory. Aligning with a Senate document shifts the claim from inquiry to coalition-building.

Contextually, this sits in a well-worn climate-war script: emphasize past climate variability, treat that as a rebuttal to attribution science, then translate uncertainty into a public-facing permission slip for inaction. The most revealing word is “glad.” It suggests the emotional payoff of belonging to an oppositional camp, where being “against” man-made warming functions as identity as much as analysis.