Coming on the heels of a giant spike in average global temperatures, the Trump campaign has chosen a climate change skeptic, Rep. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, to serve as energy advisor should the former New York City liberal win in November. Actually, climate change skeptic is just the tip of the melting iceberg here. It’s not clear if this clown even understands or cares what a greenhouse gas is:
It’s the degree (so to speak) to which he denies it that’s staggering. He’s part of the tiny, tiny head-in-the-sand deniers who won’t even acknowledge the planet’s heating up. That line in the video where he says, “We know the globe is cooling; number one we know that” is from 2012, just a few years ago. To actually say out loud that the Earth is cooling would make Orwell blush.
But he wasn’t done; he also added, “… the idea that CO2 is somehow causing global warming is on its face fraudulent.”
In simplistic terms, if it’s a reasonably stable, garden variety gas at room temperature, and if it has three or more atoms per molecule instead of one or two, odds are good it’s a greenhouse gas. Nitrogen and oxygen, the two primary constituents in Earth’s atmosphere, are called diatomic, because they come arranged in pairs of atoms, written N2 or O2, and often look kind of like a dumbbell when illustrated. But CO2 (carbon dioxide), H2O (water vapor), and CH4 (methane) all have three or more atoms in each molecule, and no surprise, all three gases trap heat way more efficiently than diatomic nitrogen or oxygen. The chart above courtesy of the Scripps Institute shows the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air over the last 50 years. It’s really not that hard to understand.
Then again Trump is not exactly providing a solid role model of scientific inquiry or integrity—or even basic acceptance of empirical reality. Back in January 2014, he seemed to think temperatures were going the other way.
“This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice” — @realDonaldTrump.
Also “mythical,” a “canard,” and “a total con job.” But come on, Donald, tell us what you really think! We don't know!
Where is Trump on climate change now? Depending on his golf game, he’s mostly skeptical, just not always very consistent. But going forward, he may well consult industry-friendly polls or his “gut” to decide, rather than the consensus of researchers built on thousands of super-accurate land and space-based thermometers maintained by premier science agencies like NASA and NOAA.