DES MOINES, IOWA -- Bernie Sanders shut down a teenage girl who questioned the existence of manmade global warming on Thursday morning, to the delight of her classmates.
A girl who introduced herself as a a "17-year-old biracial female," said that "from looking at the evidence I've seen the last few years... I haven't seen any actual scientific evidence that global warming is actually happening."
"Thank you for your question. You're wrong," Sanders said with a chortle as the teen crowd at Theodore Roosevelt High School broke into applause.
.@BernieSanders to 17 year old denying climate change is real: "Thank you for your question. You're wrong." Big applause.— Cameron Joseph (@cam_joseph) January 28, 2016
Sanders then walked through his long record of support for climate change legislation in Congress and the consensus of the scientific community, which he described as "the most knowledgable people in the world," that global warming is real.
"What they say almost unanimously, overwhelmingly, is that A, climate change is real, and B, it is caused by human activity," he said before warming about its "catastrophic" effects.
"I appreciate your point of view but I absolutely believe that climate change is real, it is caused by human activity and we need to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel," he said.
"I hear what you’re saying. I disagree with you and I think the scientific community is pretty clear on this issue," Sanders concluded to another round of applause from the teenaged audience.
Last year was the planet's hottest year on record, by far, a finding that scientists said was even more evidence of manmade global warming from burning fossil fuels.