This is a translation of the May 2, 2012 “Programa do Jo” on Globo, a half hour interview with the climate skeptic geographer Ricardo Augusto Felicio on global warming. On YouTube alone, the interview has nearly 700,000 views; in Brazil, Globo is a dominant television network. Original clip here; for a critique of the content, see here.
Tranlated by Beatriz Vianna, a Ph.D. student in biology at West Virginia University who is originally from Brazil.
Jo Soares: Today we are also gonna talk about global warming! With a climatologist who says that global warming is B.S. [Joke that can’t be translated]. I’m gonna talk to Ricardo Felicio…come over here!
[Music]
Jo Soares: So, you are a professor at the geography department at USP [São Paulo University]. And what do you study specifically--climatology, right?
Ricardo Augusto Felicio: Antarctic climatology, from the Antarctic continent, for 20 years already.
Jo Soares: Only the Antarctic continent?
Ricardo Augusto Felicio: Yeah, that is my area of expertise, but the other ones too…. there is no way to separate it (laughs).
Jo Soares: Of course! And you’ve been in Antarctica a few times…
RAF: Two times already.
JS: What do you think of the global warming theory--that the continent’s [Antarctica’s] ice is melting?
RAF: Yeah, to begin with, this is not even a theory, it is a hypothesis. It does not need scientific proof. There is no scientific proof of global warming. It’s been 26 year--in fact, it’s about 3,000 years this “story” exists. Our researchers from the Climageo team have researched about this information. This has been debated already by the ancient Greeks: “If trees were cut the planet’s climate would change….”
JS: So ancient Greece already talked about that?
