Trump’s blithe dismissal of climate science

In November 2015, in the midst of what was then considered a long-shot campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump released a book called Crippled America. In it, Trump set out his ideas about what was wrong with the US: immigrants, mostly, but also Barack Obama, the “often pathetic” media, and the “total losers” in Congress.

The book, the 18th in the Trump canon, is typically self-aggrandising, with Trump describing his own brand as “one of the world’s great icons of quality and excellence”.

Trump writes of himself: “Donald Trump builds businesses. Donald Trump builds buildings. Donald Trump develops magnificent golf courses. Donald Trump makes investments that create jobs. And Donald Trump creates jobs for legal immigrants and all Americans.”

I did a live-read of Crippled America for the Guardian (I think I was being punished for something), and one bit that jumped out at me, amid the get-off-my-lawn complaints about foreigners and how there isn’t enough discipline in schools these days, was Trump’s cavalier dismissal of the climate crisis.

“If you go back in history, you’ll find that the biggest tornadoes we’ve had in this country took place in the 1890s,” Trump wrote, wrongly. “And the most hurricanes occurred in the 1860s and 70s,” he added, also incorrectly.

The then presidential candidate concluded: “Violent climate ‘changes’ are nothing new. We have even had ice ages.” (At no point in the last 160 years has there been an ice age.) “I just don’t happen to believe they are man-made.”

Trump offered no explanation as to why he disagrees with the majority of the world’s scientists in believing that the climate crisis is not the result of human behavior. But on the day Crippled America was released he gave a press conference about the book, at Trump Tower in Manhattan, so I popped down.

I asked Trump why he didn’t believe in climate change. He paused for a couple of seconds, then said, “OK, what else,” and briskly turned to another journalist.

Trump dismissing me was unimportant, just a mildly funny story I could tell people back home. But his blithe dismissal of science could have huge consequences.

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As Hurricane Melissa batters the Caribbean, scientists have said its extraordinary intensification is probably a symptom of the rapid heating of the world’s oceans. But Trump doesn’t believe that. And when world leaders gather for the Cop30 climate summit in Brazil next month, there is expected to be no delegation from the US – on his first day in office, Trump ordered the withdrawal of the US, the world’s second biggest emitter of planet-heating pollution, from the Paris climate agreement.

Meanwhile the president’s bizarre hatred for renewable energy (see: windfarms are driving whales “loco”) has seen the US fall behind the rest of the world, as Trump has instead, in the words of my colleague Oliver Milman, “become the planet’s foremost advocate of fossil fuels”.

Trump launched more attacks on the environment in the first 100 days of his second term than in his entire first term, Oliver wrote earlier this year, while the advocacy organization Carbon Brief found that a climate report released by the Trump administration in July was jam-packed full of false and misleading statements.

This month Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, signalling that the next three years of US environmental policy will essentially amount to the government burying its head in the sand.

At a time when the UN says humanity has missed its target of limiting global heating to 1.5C, and the UN secretary general has warned of “devastating consequences” for the world, it’s clear that there will be no leadership from Trump, one of the great climate change non-believers.

Why does the president think that? We’ll never know. But the consequences could be catastrophic.