Murray Energy Chairman and CEO Robert Murray on Friday claimed global warming is a hoax and repeated a debunked claim that the phenomenon cannot exist because the Earth's surface is cooling.
Murray appeared on CNBC's "Squawk Box" to discuss Republicans' rollback of an Obama-era rule that would have restricted coal mining near waterways. President Donald Trump signed the measure on Thursday in front of Murray and a group of Murray Energy workers.
Murray Energy is the country's largest coal miner. Many of its mines are in Appalachia, a region that would suffer some of the biggest impacts of the rule. Murray also successfully sued to delay implementation of the Clean Power Plan, which would regulate planet-warming carbon emissions from power plants.
Asked about the economic analysis behind President Barack Obama's energy regulations, Murray said, "There's no scientific analysis either. I have 4,000 scientists that tell me global warming is a hoax. The Earth has cooled for 20 years."
It was not immediately clear who the 4,000 scientists Murray referenced are.
Asked for clarification, a spokesperson for Murray Energy sent links to the Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change, which says "human-caused climate change is not a global crisis," and the Global Warming Petition Project, a list of science degree holders who don't think humans cause climate change.
Murray's claim that there is no scientific analysis behind climate change is not true.
A landmark 2013 study assessed 4,000 peer-reviewed papers by 10,000 climate scientists that gave an opinion on the cause of climate change. It showed 97 percent of the authors attributed climate change to manmade causes.
His second claim that Earth is cooling is also false.
Temperatures were the warmest on record last year, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was the third year in a row global average temperatures set a record.
"The planet's average surface temperature has risen about 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere," NASA and NOAA said.
Climate change skeptics sometimes point to cool land temperatures to dispute global warming. Scientists have repeatedly noted that water covers 70 percent of the Earth's surface, so it is highly misleading to cast temperatures on land as a representation of global-scale temperatures.
Land also heats and cools more quickly than the ocean, The Weather Channel noted while debunking a recent Breitbart News article that was widely found to have cherry-picked data to cast doubt on climate change.
