Has Donald Trump Called Global Warming a Hoax?
Has Donald Trump called global warming a hoax? Like many of the things Trump has said, the answer is complicated. All too often, Trump has shown an uncanny “ability” to say one thing on a given Monday, only to retract it the following Tuesday. The global warming or climate change issue, given its extreme politicization and popularity with younger voters—many of whom are Republican—is, no pun intended, a hot potato.
The subject of Donald Trump on global warming has therefore snowballed. It might be better to speak of what Donald Trump actually said to get to the truth of the matter. Given his fondness for Twitter, the current President of the United States has left a long record of statements about global warming. In 2012, Donald Trump, the businessman, made it clear he thought little of global warming.
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The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012
What Has Trump Said About Global Warming?
That tweet left little doubt. Donald Trump’s stance on global warming was clear; global warming is a tool for China to become richer. Trump considers it to be something that America’s economic competitors have invented to slow down its economy. Until the end of 2015, Trump’s tweets displayed a combination of outright global warming denial and overt sarcasm. Here’s one of the best examples of this attitude.
It's late in July and it is really cold outside in New York. Where the hell is GLOBAL WARMING??? We need some fast! It's now CLIMATE CHANGE
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2014
But as the presidential race became more real for Donald Trump, the candidate, there were hints of change. It’s not necessarily that he stopped believing global warming was a hoax. It’s that on the campaign trail, Trump might have noticed that many Republicans—not to mention Democrats—had been experiencing real anxiety about man-made global warming.
In January of 2016, when it became clear that Trump had all but officially been crowned as the Republican candidate, the real estate magnate from New York City started to shilly-shally on the topic. Rather than reaffirming his previous announcements, Trump no longer claimed global warming was just an invention for China’s sake. To be sure, he repeated the phrase, but suggested that he linked China to the global warming issue as a joke. (Source: “Donald Trump Slams Iran Deal,” Fox News, January 18, 2016.)
Anyone who had followed Trump up to that point had to have observed that Donald Trump’s stance on global warming had—if not changed—evolved. Indeed, the closer the day of the election, November 8, approached, the more Trump’s opinion on global warming seemed to falter. He tried to play down the conviction of the first Donald Trump global warming tweet, the one about it being a hoax for China’s benefit.
Trump Pulls Out of the Paris Accord
On June 2 of this year, Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement to combat climate change. However ridiculous the image and idea that climate change is something that can be fought—as ridiculous a concept as “the war on terrorism”—President Obama, the Democrats, and many Republicans had enthusiastically endorsed the Paris Agreement.
By pulling out of the Paris Agreement, therefore, observers keeping score of Trump’s stance on global warming had their ultimate proof. But, did they? This is Trump, after all. He has fine-tuned the art of saying one thing and denying it hours later. It’s his strategy for negotiating deals; it has probably served him well in his years spent building an international real estate empire.
But part of that strategy, perhaps its key aspect, is to keep everyone confused. Thus, on June 3, answering critics’ questions at the United Nations, Trump’s ambassador, Nikki Haley surprised everyone.
“President Trump believes the climate is changing,” said Haley, speaking on CNN’s State of the Union. But the real kicker was this unexpected bit about global warming and its causes. Haley said President Trump “believes pollutants are part of that equation. So that is the fact.” (Source: “Haley: ‘President Trump believes the climate is changing’,” CNN, June 4, 2017.)
To recapitulate, Trump mocked climate change and global warming for years. He called it anything from a joke to a hoax. He used it as evidence that China is actively pursuing interests that hurt the United States, the implication being that not only is global warming a joke, but that it’s a danger to American prosperity.
Then, just as his presidential actions represented an explicit repudiation of man-made global warming, his UN ambassador concedes that the President does think that humans may have something to do with it. Haley explained that Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Accord because it hurt U.S. companies.
Is Climate Change a Hoax?
Is climate change a hoax? No. No scientist, whether he be a physicist or geologist, has denied this part of the debate. You don’t even need to be a trained “insert anything here”-ist of any kind to recognize that climate changes. The question should be: Is the concept of man-made climate change a hoax?
The media has been hammering the story for years. It’s presented the facts as if they are irrefutable. It has made challenging the idea of man-made climate change almost the equivalent of Holocaust denial. Those who challenge this version of climate change are labeled “deniers.” Skeptics might be a better term.
Moreover, the skeptics or deniers are presented as thickheaded characters, not unlike the locals in the 1972 movie Deliverance, who refuse science. Thus, on top of being dangerous homicidal deniers, they are also unscientific troglodytes who believe in Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and that the earth is flat.
But, rather than challenge the concept of man-made climate change head-on, it is more instructive to expose an important and omitted aspect of the argument. The climate change proponents who signed the Paris Climate Accord like to bring up the “97% scientific consensus” on climate change. In fact, there are scientists, many of them prominent climatologists, geologists, and physicists, who either doubt the extent of man-made influence on the climate or outright deny it has any influence. Some deniers include Nobel prize-winning physicists Carlo Rubbia and Antonino Zichichi. But the list is full of prominent—and real (Al Gore is no scientist)—people of science.
The source for the 97% consensus is one Naomi Oreskes. She’s a science historian at Harvard—not a climatologist. But, Dr. Oreskes decided to study some 900 peer-reviewed papers, published from 1993 to 2003. Her review process revealed that some 75% of the papers agreed with the idea that humans were responsible for the climate changes of the past 50 years. Those that didn’t, did not outright reject the concept. That’s the meaning of the 97% consensus. (Source: “The Myth of the Climate Change ‘97%’,” The Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2014.)
But, Dr. Oreskes—perhaps deliberately—ignored dozens of other articles and studies by such climatologists as Richard Lindzen or Patrick Michaels, who have openly refuted the man-made climate change claims. You may have heard the frequently cited explanation that these scientists take money from the “oil corporations.”
The truth is that it doesn’t pay to deny climate change. There’s no money in denial. Even the oil companies have bought into man-made climate change. In academia, if you challenge the so-called 97% consensus (when has science been done by consensus?), you don’t get money. The issue has been politicized and monetized. Consider that Dr. Judith Curry, a climatologist and the Chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, resigned over this very problem. (Source: “Georgia Tech Climatologist Judith Curry Resigns over ‘the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science‘,” Reason, January 4, 2017.)
Therefore, without knowing, in his own haphazard way, Trump is the world leader who has interpreted the Paris Climate deal in the only “scientific” way. It’s silly. Man-made climate change proponents have deliberately mixed up the concept of pollution (which is no doubt a bad thing) with climate change. But carbon dioxide, the alleged culprit of climate changes we all must fight, is not a pollutant. It’s the gas of life. Biology is one big CO2 derivative in one way or another. Mars, a planet without any humans (yet) experiences “climate change” all by itself. Therefore, Trump has the unintended virtue of agreeing with real scientists, the ones who are rigorous and refuse to attach their research to political and financial gain.
