President Donald Trump, an area man who believes cold weather disproves the theory of climate change, granted an ITV interview on Sunday to Piers Morgan, an equally pasty area man who has lots of extremely bad opinions about the N-word.
Per the Independent, this low-budget performance of No Exit veered into an unfortunate exchange on climate change. Trump, who is not only not a scientist but has convinced himself he is smarter than all of them—none of those nerds are the president!—offered up some of his famous rambling diatribes on why climate change is a hoax, or the planet is actually cooling, or something:
There is a cooling, and there’s a heating. I mean, look, it used to not be climate change, it used to be global warming. That wasn’t working too well because it was getting too cold all over the place.
Later, the president betrayed a complete lack of understanding of sea ice levels, which the Chicago Tribune noted fluctuate year to year but are in general declining rapidly, and hit record lows at both poles in 2017. He seems to believe they’re actually better than ever:
The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records. They’re at a record level.
Finally, Trump kept on trumpeting what a bad deal the Paris climate change agreement was, part of a long pattern of just making shit up about the non-binding agreement that completely ignores the significant commitments made by other countries and support from most sectors of the economy not directly related to extracting and burning fossil fuels.
Though some publications are running with headlines suggesting that the president said he was open to re-entering the deal, a closer reading suggests that Donald has no idea what’s in the agreement and seems to think he can renegotiate it to be about clean coal or something:
If somebody said go back into the Paris accord, it would have to be a completely different deal because we had a horrible deal. As usual, they took advantage of the U.S.
Would I go back in? Yeah, I’d go back in … but it’s got to be a good deal for the U.S.
In other words, our big, boisterous president is still talking nonsense about climate change and refuses to budge even a half inch from his profound ignorance on the subject. Ha ha! It’s all fun and games, except scientists project that if the world doesn’t reduce fossil fuel use, approximately 74 percent of the world’s population will experience potentially lethal temperatures for at least 20 days a year (up from 30 percent today!) by the end of the century, and other reports have found the hidden costs of climate change in the U.S. likely already amount to hundreds of billions a year.
Morgan, for what it’s worth, thinks that it’s just great that no one “draws a bigger, more visceral reaction than Donald Trump,” which is kind of like saying that love it or hate it, no planet’s climate is changing faster than Earth’s.