President Donald Trump said a lot of dumb things in an interview with Piers Morgan this week while visiting the UK, giving our friends across the pond the full Trump experience. At some point during his visit, Prince Charles apparently spent an hour and a half trying to drill some sense into President Poobrain’s skull about climate change--to, of course, little effect.
For example, as he explained to Morgan why the Prince’s lecture failed to sway him, Trump claimed that the US “has among the cleanest climates there are based on all statistics.” In another interview, Trump claimed we’re “setting records” when it comes to clean air and water.
Obviously there are no actual statistics that deal with how “clean” the climate is, since that makes absolutely no sense, but there are statistics about how much carbon pollution is in the atmosphere. Turns out we are setting records! Just…not good ones.
For example, NOAA tweeted on Tuesday that “Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere hit a record high in May.” Whoops.
Trump also trotted out the ol’ reliable denier trope that “it used to be called global warming, that wasn’t working, then it was called climate change. Now it’s actually called extreme weather, because with extreme weather you can’t miss.”
Except, of course, it’s been called climate change since at least the 1970s (with “climatic change” being proposed by the WMO in the ‘60s) and the IPCC has always been the IPCC and not the IPGW, and extreme weather is just one consequence of a warmer world. Trump might know this if he chose to read and could comprehend the school-age explanation of the name on NASA’s website.
Lastly, one of the most bizarre of all the many ridiculous things Trump said during his English trip is that he believes that there is “a change in weather,” but that “it changes both ways.” And while there’s certainly nothing wrong with a climate that goes both ways, the fact is that for the last century or so it’s been headed pretty clearly in one direction: hotter. For example, it’s been some 413 months since it was globally cooler than the 20th-century average.
At this point, we can expect nothing more than incoherent lies about climate change from our president. But while Trump may be embarrassing us all in the UK, at least he unwittingly did one nice thing.
Happy Pride!
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