U.S. President Trump mocks climate change: delights in showing his ignorance?

Trump’s call for some ‘good old global warming’ ridiculed by climate experts. US president again conflates weather with climate to mock climate change. Experts call comments ‘scientifically ridiculous and demonstrably false’, Guardian, Michael McGowan and Joanna Walters, -30 Dec 17, -Donald Trump once dismissed it as a “hoax” created by the Chinese to destroy American jobs, but on a freezing Thursday night in the eastern US the president found himself pining for some of that “good old global warming”.

On holiday in Florida on Thursday, Trump wondered if global warming might not be such a problem after all.

As severe cold and record amounts of snow swept across the US east coast, Trump wrote on Twitter that his people “could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against”.

“Bundle up!” he added.

The president was reheating two favourite tropes: the conflation of weather with climate to pour scepticism on global warming, and the supposed cost to the American taxpayer of the Paris climate accord, from which he has confirmed the US will withdraw.

Climate scientists, however, have long warned against using individual weather events to ponder the existence or otherwise of global warming. Weather, they point out, refers to atmospheric conditions during a short period; climate relates to longer-term weather patterns.

On Friday, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale University’s project on climate change communication, said Trump’s tweet was “scientifically ridiculous and demonstrably false”.

“There is a fundamental difference in scale between what weather is and what climate is,” he said. “What’s going on in one small corner of the world at a given moment does not reflect what’s going on with the planet.”

The extreme cold snap in the eastern US is a rare example of a place experiencing below-average winter temperatures, he said, a point that was neatly illustrated by a map tweeted out by the Weather Channel on Friday.

Elsewhere, Matthew England, a climate scientist from the University of New South Wales, called Trump’s comment “an ignorant misconception of the way the earth’s climate works”.

“Nobody ever said winter would go away under global warming, but winter has become much milder and the record cold days are being far outnumbered by record warm days and heat extremes,” he said. “Climate change is not overturned by a few unusually cold days in the US.”

……. Climate modelling showed cold snaps like the one in the US were actually becoming less common as a result of global warming,David Karoly, a climate scientist from the University of Melbourne,said, adding that rapid attribution analysis means scientists are now able to look more closely at “classes of events”.

That type of modelling for the north-east of the US, he said, showed that although there was a great deal of year-to-year variability, the average coldest temperature in December in the region has increased in the past 50 years……….https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/29/donald-trump-good-old-global-warming-us-winterhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/29/donald-trump-good-old-global-warming-us-winter

December 30, 2017 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change, USA

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