CNN's "Newsroom" co-host Jim Sciutto on Wednesday contemplated whether the human race is running out of time to curb rising global temperatures, saying humans "don't want to be slowly burned to death."
Sciutto made the comments during a discussion with Andrea Dutton, an associate professor of geology at the University of Florida. Sciutto referenced President Donald Trump's recent Washington Post interview, where he dismissed the federal government’s landmark climate change report released last week, questioning the human impact on climate change and the scientific consensus.
"The president also either deliberately or mistakingly messes up the distinction between a clean environment and a warming environment. He keeps saying, 'Well, we have record clean environment' [and] doesn't get to the temperature issue," Sciutto said.
"I just want to ask the question for folks at home, folks like us. We got kids. We don’t want to be slowly burned to death on our own planet here," said Sciutto, who served in the Obama State Department prior to joining CNN. "Is the human race running — in the simplest terms, running out of time to take the measures necessary to rein in this rise in global temperatures?"
Sciutto's remark follows the National Climate Assessment's comprehensive 1,600-page report about the dangerous effects of global warming on the United States' agriculture, infrastructure, and the overall economy, the Hill reported.
"Global average temperature has increased by about 1.8 [degrees] from 1901 to 2016, and observational evidence does not support any credible natural explanations for this amount of warming," the report reads. "Instead, the evidence consistently points to human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse or heat-trapping gases, as the dominant cause."
"The warming trend observed over the past century can only be explained by the effects that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, have had on the climate," the assessment reads.