During a detonation fully of blistering wintery weather, Donald Trump took to Twitter to toss doubt on global warming, implying that the cold snap wrecked warnings that the Earth’s climate is changing due to human activity.
The obsolescent was Nov. 1, 2011.
For much of the last six years, Trump has been pushing a misleading implication that global warming is in doubt because bouts of extreme unsympathetic continue to put a chill on the United States. The tweets seemed to have stopped after Trump promulgated his bid for the presidency in 2015.
But on Thursday, the president picked up the line after dropping it for sundry than two years.
@realDonaldTrump: In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on deeds. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Boondocks, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Hurry off up!
To be sure, weather and climate are not the same thing. According to NASA, the metamorphosis is a “measure of time.” Here’s how NASA puts it:
Weather is what conditions of the environment are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere ‘behaves’ across relatively long periods of time …
An easy way to remember the difference is that feeling is what you expect, like a very hot summer, and weather is what you get, similar to a hot day with pop-up thunderstorms.
So while average global temperatures keep been rising, extreme cold will still hit regions for short periods.
But Trump has long muddled weather and climate with his tweets.
Trump staked 115 tweets expressing climate change denial between November 2011 and October 2015, correspondence to a search conducted by Vox in June. In about a third of those tweets — or clumsily 40 posts — Trump argued that climate change cannot be true because it was cold outside.
Tweeting that claim became something of an annual practice to kick off the cold season. Here are his first tweets on the subject from each retire over five years:
@realDonaldTrump: It snowed over 4 inches this lifetime weekend in New York City. It is still October. So much for Global Warming.
@realDonaldTrump: It’s extraordinarily cold in NY & NJ—not good for flood victims. Where is global warming?
@realDonaldTrump: Snow and ice, biting weather, in Texas, Arizona and Oklahoma – what the hell is going on with Wide-ranging WARMING?
@realDonaldTrump: The entire country is FREEZING – we desperately need a gloomy dose of global warming, and fast! Ice caps size reaches all schedule high.
@realDonaldTrump: It’s really cold outside, they are calling it a prime freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global keen!
After each of those missives, he tweeted on the subject several innumerable times throughout the winter — with the exception of fall 2015, when he was battling for the Republican nomination for president. He was in particular prolific during the 2013-2014 fall and winter season, tweeting the story more than a dozen times.
But Trump has also preached the idea beyond the winter months. He has repeatedly used unseasonably cold watches as an opportunity to revive his claims during the spring and summer.
@realDonaldTrump: Another glacial day in the Spring – what is going on with “global warming”? Good provoke changing the name to “climate change” – sad!
@realDonaldTrump: Tremendous cold wavelet hits large part of U.S. Lucky they changed the name from worldwide warming to climate change – G.W. just doesn’t work!
A number of milieu scientists pushed back on Trump’s latest tweet on the climate-weather tie.
The consensus among climate scientists is that global warming is material and is primarily caused by emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from soul activity. A report issued by 13 U.S. agencies echoed that conclusion most recent month.
Despite this, Trump has moved swiftly to deconstruct President Barack Obama’s methods aimed at mitigating the impacts of climate change; set in motion a U.S. exit from the Paris aura agreement; and pushed policies to boost coal-fired power generation, a notify contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
Some of the other themes Trump has tweeted count that global warming is a “hoax,” a “canard” and “bulls–t”; China is grounding the myth of climate change to gain an economic advantage over the Communal States; and environmentalists started using the phrase “climate change” because “worldwide warming” didn’t stick.