Trump's environment chief Scott Pruitt suggests climate change could be good for humanity

'We know that humans have most flourished during time of warming trends'

The man appointed by Donald Trump to run the US's environmental agency has suggested global warming could be good for humanity.

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, told a Las Vegas TV station humans have “flourished” during times of warming and that it may not be a “bad thing”.

The 59-year-old admitted humans contribute to climate change to some degree because “we live in the climate”, but questioned whether it really was an “existential threat”.

“We know that humans have most flourished during time of warming trends,” Mr Pruitt told KSNV. “I think there are assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing.

“Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100, in the year 2018? That’s fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”

Nasa's global land-ocean temperature graph (Nasa)

He added he wanted an “honest, transparent debate about what we do know and what we don’t know, so the American people can be informed and make decisions on their own”.

Mr Pruitt, who made his remarks in a city seeing one of its warmest winters since records began, has previously said he is considering a televised debate between climate scientists and sceptics after falsely claiming there is no scientific consensus on the issue.

The EPA administrator’s views echo those of the US President, who recently mocked mainstream science by claiming the eastern US “could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming” during a cold snap.

Mr Trump has also claimed manmade climate change was “created” by the Chinese to “make US manufacturing non-competitive”.

Mr Pruitt’s beliefs appear to contradict the position of his own agency. The EPA’s website states that climate change “threaten our health by affecting the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe and the weather we experience”.

No national or international scientific body currently disputes the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that humans are the “dominant cause” of global warming since the mid-20th Century.