Donald Trump: Global Warming Is ‘Bull****’ Because It’s Cold Out
Donald Trump, the real estate developer and former reality TV star who threatened a run for president in 2012, called global warming “bull****” in a New Year’s Day tweet. The numerous rebuttals to his statement didn’t stop Trump from doubling down with several more tweets saying basically the same thing.
Trump’s original tweet read, “This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bull**** has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice”
Donald Trump’s “stuck in ice” reference was a remark about the Russian-owned scientific vessel Akademik Shokalskiy which became immobilized on Christmas Eve in thick ice floes while on an expedition to study climate change in the Antarctic.
As The Guardian explained, the Russian ship did not become trapped in ice because the temperature near the South Pole plummeted, as Donald Trump seems to believe.
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
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2014
The ship was trapped in ice floating in the water after breaking off from a glacier which as Antarctic climate expert Tony Press told the paper, results simply from, “wind patterns, storms, tidal activity and ambient temperatures. These are variable, local conditions.”
In fact, as science journalist Chris Mooney wrote on the BillMoyers.com web site, the increase in ice breaking away from glaciers and other ice formations is itself the result of global warming. It is not happening because, as Donald Trump says, “our planet is freezing.”
Antarctica, as the Skeptical Science web site explains, is a land mass, 98 percent covered in ice. Due to climate change, Antarctic land ice has been decreasing while sea ice has been doing just the opposite. “The implicit assumption is it must be cooling around Antarctica. This is decidedly not the case,” writer John Cook explains. “In fact, the Southern Ocean has been warming faster than the rest of the world’s oceans.”
“@princebe: Antarctic ice shelf melt ‘lowest EVER recorded, global warming is NOT eroding it’ http://t.co/XZBepuyI1O via @theregister”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2014
Mooney also makes the point that, though it is now of course winter on large parts of the planet bringing cold and snow to regions such as the U.S. northeast, it is also summer elsewhere on planet Earth.
Australia is currently in the middle of summer. That country’s Bureau of Meteorology confirmed this week that 2013 was the hottest year in more than a century of weather record-keeping, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
Temperatures in some regions of Australia hit a record 120 degrees Fahrenheit on January 3.
His latest erroneous statements are not the first time Donald Trump has mistaken isolated cold temperatures for definitive proof that global warming is not real. During the cold spell of 2010 that his the U.S. northeast and other reasons, as quoted by The New York Post, Trump said the snowy, icy weather meant that, “the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore.”