Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has rendered his opinion on climate change, and it is characteristically off-kilter.
“Unless somebody can prove something to me, I believe there’s weather. I believe there’s change,” Trump told radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt on Monday.
In a confusing exchange with Hewitt, Trump rattled off several non sequiturs on global temperatures. Trump says that “people in the 1920s thought the Earth was cooling, now it’s global warming,” implying that all subsequent climate science is nonsense.
As David Roberts at Vox points out, scientists never actually believed that the Earth was cooling. Trump appears to be repeating talking points from climate change deniers, who often rely on a 1970s article in Newsweek for their research on “global cooling.” The author of that article has made it clear that the Earth is, in fact, warming and that climate deniers should stop using his article as evidence that it’s not.
In the Hewitt interview, Trump goes on to complain about the government attempting to solve a problem that he doesn’t think “in any major fashion exists.” And he keeps talking:
And actually, we’ve had times where the weather wasn’t working out, so they changed it to extreme weather, and they have all different names, you know, so that it fits the bill. But the problem we have, and if you look at our energy costs, and all of the things that we’re doing to solve a problem that I don’t think in any major fashion exists. I mean, Obama thinks it’s the number one problem of the world today. And I think it’s very low on the list. So I am not a believer, and I will, unless somebody can prove something to me, I believe there’s weather. I believe there’s change, and I believe it goes up and it goes down, and it goes up again. And it changes depending on years and centuries, but I am not a believer, and we have much bigger problems.
This is not the first time Trump has denied climate change; he has also attempted to use cold weather to disprove climate change in the past, and argued that global warming was “created by and for the Chinese”:
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
CORRECTION: Due to an editing error, a previous version of this article misstated that the transcription of the interview was from Vox.
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