Trump’s Climate Change Lie

Trump tells a lie without any evidence that the Chinese invented climate change as a hoax to harm the USA. How plausible is this lie?

• Scientists from every country on earth say Trump’s hoax is nonsense. Why would they all be complicit with a Chinese conspiracy?
• According to Trump, given that all scientist must be in on the hoax, why has there not been even one whistleblower been willing to reveal documents?
• It is not just climate scientists, but scientists in general who have read the research papers and declared them valid. By Trump’s logic, they too must be in on the conspiracy. Also their assistants, the staff of all the science magazines, the science bloggers… all must be in on the conspiracy. This would be the first such planetary conspiracy in history. The famous Piltdown man conspiracy had no more than three crooks.
• Global warming is not rocket science. Back in the 1800s the famous Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius discovered the mathematical formula for how much the global temperature rises with a given release of CO₂. When did his discovery become controversial? Does Trump claim Arrhenius too was in on the Chinese conspiracy?
• Trump believes the earth as a whole is not warming, even though he has never taken the necessary thousands of measurements all over the globe over time to average. As proof, his friend Senator James Inhofe displayed a snowball. Inhofe is befuddled by the difference between local weather and global climate. In 2016-11 scientists measured the temperature of the arctic. It was 20°C (36°F) above normal. Imagine if you walked into your back yard today and it was 20°C (36°F) hotter than normal. That is the difference between freezing and short-sleeve shirt weather.
• Businessmen believe in climate change. They are busily arranging cruises through the newly ice-free arctic waters.
• Some climate change deniers accept that CO₂ levels are rapidly rising and that it is causing the whole world to heat up, but they deny the source is man. They posit some mysterious source. But we know to three decimal places just how much CO₂ is emitted when you burn 1 litre (1.06 US quarts) of gasoline or burn 1 cubic metre (1.31 cubic yards) of natural gas. We have historical financial records of fuel sales. We know that we have burned a shitload of fossil fuel (about half the world supply) and thus released a shitload of CO₂, quite enough to kick the shit out of the climate. What Trump is doing like having a diarrhoea attack, leaving it for others to clean up, then trying to blame an invisible canary.
• When Trump talked about climate change during the election, it became clear he did not know the difference between climate and weather. If he is that clueless about things even a second grader understands, his understanding of his alleged hoax is surely just as addled.
• Why would the Chinese let Trump in on their conspiracy?
• We have been directly measuring CO₂ levels since 1950. We can go back 400,000 years before that by measuring bubbles in ice cores. Today’s levels are higher than they ever been before. Climate change deniers reject these measurements including ones made long before the hoax was allegedly hatched. Yet the deniers offer no better measurements or an explanation why every measurement ever taken was wrong. They trust you will not look at their argument too closely.
• We have been directly measuring temperature at various spots on the globe for centuries. Even Thomas Jefferson kept meticulous temperature records. By averaging the spot measurements over the year at various places on the globe we can compute the average global temperature. The average can rise even when some spots are unusually cold. Today we have satellites to help gather readings especially over the ocean. Climate change deniers reject these measurements, including ones made long before the hoax was allegedly hatched. Yet the deniers offer no better measurements or an explanation why every measurement ever taken was wrong. They trust you will not look at their argument too closely. The warming is so pronounced that lay people can now notice it as plants and animals migrate north over the years. They can also notice the trees and plants blooming earlier each year and the birds returning earlier each year.
• Climate change is very basic science. Predicting exactly how it will progress is rocket science, but that is happening and that this a bad thing is pretty darn simple. The main extra thing you need to know is there is more than one greenhouse gas. Methane (cow farts) CH₄ is 25 times more potent than CO₂. Livestock are thus creating about 20% of the climate change problem.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)