Joe Biden says climate change deniers are “Neanderthals” — that’s not fair to Neanderthals

President Biden described climate change deniers as “Neanderthals” during a speech on Thursday in Brownsville, Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border. Fox News and other conservative media appear to be depicting this as an unacceptable insult — but perhaps it was most unfair to the Neanderthals.

“I’ve been [in] helicopters in the West, in the Southwest and Northwest, flown over more land burned to the ground, all the vegetation gone, than the entire state of Maryland,” Biden told his audience, partly referring to the wildfires now raging in Texas. “The idea there’s no such thing as climate change, I love that, man,” the president added with evident sarcasm. “I love some of my Neanderthal friends who still think there’s no climate change.”

As Biden suggested, those who either deny that our planet’s climate is changing with potentially catastrophic results or who claim that the changes are not primarly caused by human activity have been discredited by science. Empirical evidence clearly shows that the world is warming to an unprecedented degree and that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are the primary cause. Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide trap the Sun’s heat after it reaches Earth, which has caused elevated temperatures, increasingly extreme wildfires, intensified storms, worsened flooding and rising sea levels.

Biden’s implication that Neanderthals, an archaic and now extinct human species, were unintelligent is factually dubious. There is considerable evidence that Neanderthal humans created art, practiced some form of herbal medicine, used tools and performed burial rituals. Although the Neanderthals are no longer with us, many modern humans have small amounts of Neanderthal DNA.

There is no doubt that modern humans, rather than Neanderthals, are responsible for climate change, which Dr. Michael E. Mann of the University of Pennsylvania described in a Salon interview as a “‘new abnormal’ … now playing out in real time. … It will only get worse and worse as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels and generate carbon pollution.”