Trump Clings to Inaccurate Climate Change Talking Points

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Former President Donald Trump, who famously called climate change a “hoax” in 2016, hasn’t used the word lately with respect to climate change. But he still clings to some similar arguments, and other claims he makes about climate change haven’t changed much over the years.

Some of his claims reflect a larger shift in rhetoric that other Republicans have embraced. Instead of suggesting that the phenomenon isn’t occurring, isn’t due to humans or the burning of fossil fuels, or that somehow the science isn’t settled (it is), politicians who oppose climate action increasingly use other tactics.

This includes accusing others of exaggerating the risks of climate change, making false claims about clean energy and other climate change solutions, as well as incorrectly claiming that nothing can be done about it.

But for the most part, Trump’s comments are firmly rooted in older tropes that deny or question the existence of climate change — or are far from new. As we recently detailed, this summer Trump has revived claims from 2019, repeatedly providing absurdly low estimates for sea level rise — and at times indicating that maybe even those tiny increases won’t happen at all — to argue that climate change isn’t a concern.

That claim was again on display in a podcast episode that aired on Aug. 26, when he said “the oceans in 500 years will raise a quarter of an inch” and “the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years.”

“You know, they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s weather,” he added.

Climate, of course, is not the same as weather. Weather refers to short-term atmospheric conditions, the National Ocean Service explains, whereas climate is average weather over an area for an extended period of time.

The conflation of climate and weather — such as the idea that cold weather or a snowstorm disproves global warming — is a strategy those opposed to climate action have used for years. 

Trump has previously said he doesn’t “think science knows” whether temperatures will increase to similarly cast doubt on climate change. But while scientists can’t know the exact future — largely because they cannot predict how humans will ultimately respond — there is no question that global warming is happening.

Global sea levels, for example, are already rising a bit more than one-eighth of an inch per year, contrary to Trump’s claim, and by 2050 the sea level along the U.S. coastline is projected to be 10 to 12 inches higher than in 2000.

Later in the podcast interview, which was with Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL, Trump repeated other familiar falsehoods about climate change. We contacted the Trump campaign to clarify multiple aspects of the former president’s comments and to ask Trump’s position on climate change, but we did not receive a response. Here, we review several of the claims he made in his interview with Ryan.

Scientists Still Use the Term ‘Global Warming’

When first broaching the topic of climate change in the interview, Trump falsely claimed that people — presumably, scientists or Democrats — had to stop using the term “global warming” and replace it with “climate change” because not every place was getting warmer. 

“You know, when I hear these poor fools talking about global warming, they don’t call it that anymore, they call it climate change because, you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and warming. It didn’t work,” he told Ryan, referring to the term. “So they finally got it right … they just call it climate change. They used to call it global warming.”

Trump has been spinning a version of this changing-of-the-terms story since at least 2019, and has repeated it on at least three other occasions this summer. Other politicians, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, have been saying something like it even longer.

But it’s bogus, as we’ve written. Scientists have not stopped saying “global warming.” On the contrary, the term appears in more than 40,000 papers so far this year, according to a Google Scholar search. And there’s nothing problematic about it, either.

Global warming is “the unusually rapid increase in Earth’s average surface temperature over the past century primarily due to the greenhouse gases released by people burning fossil fuels,” NASA explains. The term specifically refers to average temperatures across the globe and “does not mean temperatures rise everywhere at every time by [the] same rate,” the agency adds. The fact that a few places have gotten cooler over time does not negate the overwhelming trend in the opposite direction for the rest of the world, nor does it invalidate the term.

Climate change is a related but more general term for long-term changes to the climate. Many scientists prefer saying climate change because it captures the wider range of effects that will occur as the planet warms, such as loss of Arctic ice, sea level rise, and more or more severe extreme weather, including hurricanes, wildfires and floods.

In the early 2000s, a GOP strategist also advised Republican politicians to use the term “climate change” because it sounded “more controllable” and “less frightening” than global warming.

‘Global Cooling’ Myth

Trump further cast doubt on climate change by extending his claim about terminology to say that even earlier, scientists had predicted the planet would get colder.

“You know, years ago they used to call it global cooling,” he said. “In the 1920s, they thought the planet was going to freeze. Now they think the planet’s going to burn up.”

Trump previously referred to “global cooling” to undermine climate change in 2018, and did so again at a rally in Virginia in late June, when he added, “They had a picture, I think it was on Time Magazine, of the Earth. Very cool, 1920s. It was a global cooling thing.” 

The suggestion is clear: If scientists were wrong about the climate before, then they could be wrong about it now. But it’s a myth that there was a scientific consensus about “global cooling” before. And even if some scientists did once think that cooling might be coming, it would not change the current reality — based on a significant body of evidence — that global warming is happening. 

Most often, those who make the argument — which dates back at least two decades — cite news articles from the 1970s, including a 1974 Time story titled “Another Ice Age?,” which warn of an impending cool period. But as we’ve explained before, even at the time, those news stories were not accurately capturing scientific thought on the topic. Climate science as a field was also still in its infancy.

It’s unclear which news story Trump had in mind. He mentioned Time, but in a search, we couldn’t find any such articles from the 1920s. There were a couple reports in the New York Times in the early 1920s about an explorer making a trip to the Arctic to investigate the possibility of a new “ice age.” In 1926, the Times also wrote of a Berlin astronomer who predicted the return of glaciers to Northern Europe well into the future. In either case, climate science as we know it did not exist at the time, and scientists’ understanding of the planet has vastly improved since then. It’s irrelevant what scientists thought a century ago about climate change.

University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann told us Trump “simply mangled the shop-worn, untruthful climate denier talking point” that scientists were predicting global cooling in the 1970s. “[T]hey weren’t,” he said.

It’s also possible Trump is thinking of a fake Time magazine cover. A photoshopped cover purportedly from 1977 showing a penguin on ice with the headline, “How to Survive the Coming Ice Age,” appeared online sometime before 2013. But in fact, the cover’s image was from 2007, and the real headline was “The Global Warming Survival Guide.”

The doctored cover began recirculating as part of a meme in 2019, as we’ve written. There’s even evidence that Trump saw the fake cover and was informed it was a fraud. In 2017, Politico reported that an adviser printed it out and showed it to Trump, who was president at the time. According to Politico, “[s]taff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.”

Misconstruing a Climate Report 

Immediately after Trump’s “global cooling” claim, the former president said “they” predicted “we have 12 years to live,” mischaracterizing a climate report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“And we’re still waiting for the 12 years,” he told Ryan. “You know, we’re down almost to the end of the 12-year period, you understand, that with these lunatics that know nothing, they weren’t even good students at schools, they didn’t even study it. They predict, they said, we have 12 years to live. And people didn’t have babies.”

“Every time it turns a little slightly warm, ‘It’s global warming … the planet is going to hell.’ What about those people that used to say we have 12 years, 12 years, in which case, we’re all gone?” Trump similarly said at his Virginia rally in June. “That ended about five years ago. We keep waiting.”

Trump is likely referring to a 2018 special report from the IPCC that concluded that to avoid the worst effects of climate change, global warming would have to be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — a feat that would require global carbon dioxide emissions to decline by about 45% below 2010 levels by 2030. 

Since there were just 12 years between the report’s release and 2030, many news headlines at the time incorrectly interpreted the report as saying there were just 12 years left to take action on climate change.

In 2019, when we wrote about similar claims from Democrats, who were underscoring the urgency needed on climate change, we explained that the report didn’t say there was a 12-year deadline to do something, nor does research back that interpretation. Acting sooner to cut heat-trapping emissions is better than tackling the issue later, but there isn’t a single deadline by which action must be taken or it will be “too late.”

“The 1.5 and 2 degree thresholds aren’t magical tipping points,” where “we’re okay before then and it’s a disaster afterwards,” Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at NASA, told us then.

President Joe Biden has similarly inaccurately characterized the 1.5 degree mark as a “point of no return.” Those opposed to climate action have also sometimes used the same language to mock those concerned about climate change and suggest that the fears are overblown.

“No climate scientist I know has EVER claimed that ‘we have 12 years to live,’” Mann told us in an email, calling Trump’s claim “fabricated.”

“What scientists like myself have pointed out is that the impact of climate change will become far worse if we exceed 1.5C,” he added. “And—thanks to decades of inaction because of fossil fuel companies and politicians doing their bidding—we now have to bring emissions down substantially over the next decade if we are to avoid that amount of warming.”

Mann said it was still possible to meet the 1.5 C target, noting that the obstacles “aren’t physical or technological,” but “entirely political at this point.”

Since Trump claimed in Virginia that the 12-year period had “ended about five years ago,” it’s possible he was distorting a tweet from the young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. In a now-deleted tweet from 2018, Thunberg wrote, quoting from a news article, “A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.” 

She didn’t claim that all humans would die within five years, but that’s how many people online represented her tweet five years later, in 2023. In any case, the news story she cited had misinterpreted comments by a Harvard atmospheric chemistry professor, who told us last year, when posts about her tweet were circulating, that he had never made such a prediction.

‘Clean’ Coal

In 2016, Trump campaigned on reviving the coal industry and spoke of the fuel often. But despite his administration’s efforts to remove environmental regulations, coal use has further declined, and today Trump speaks of it much less frequently. When he does mention coal, though, he often calls it “clean.”

“And coal is okay, they actually have methods now where coal becomes clean coal,” Trump told Ryan.

He also used the moniker in an Aug. 15 speech at his New Jersey golf club — “clean coal, I call it” — and again on Aug. 19 at a rally in Pennsylvania. “They do have clean coal,” he said.

As we wrote in 2018, when Trump frequently used the term, it’s unclear what he means by “clean coal.” But the only technology that substantially reduces the carbon dioxide emissions associated with burning coal is carbon capture and sequestration (or storage), or CCS. The technology is expensive and has yet to be widely deployed for coal.

In 2018, there were only two operational commercial coal carbon capture and sequestration (or storage) power plants in the world — one in the U.S. and another in Canada. Today, there are two more in China, for a total of four, according to a database of facilities compiled by the Global CCS Institute.

The sole American plant, the Petra Nova plant in Houston, began operations in 2017. It shut down in May 2020 because of plunging oil prices during the COVID-19 pandemic and reopened in September 2023.

In the interview, Trump also shifted blame to China for its continued reliance on coal. It’s true that China is building a large number of coal-fired power plants. In 2023, China was responsible for 95% of new coal plant construction in the world. The country, however, is also expanding its renewable energy sector.

China is the top producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, followed by the U.S., according to 2022 figures from Our World in Data. Per capita, however, China still lags America, and the U.S. remains the country with the highest cumulative emissions.

Wind Power

Trump, who opposed the construction of a wind farm near one of his golf courses, is well known for his particular aversion to wind power. In the past, he has exaggerated the harms of wind turbines to birds and property values and misleadingly claimed that there are “problems” when the wind doesn’t blow (the electrical grid manages just fine with the variability). His recent comments about wind have not been much different.

“The wind doesn’t work. It’s very expensive, kills the birds, destroys everything around it. It’s very, very, very, very bad,” he told Ryan. “It’s the most expensive energy — wind. And then every nine years you have to replace the turbines. You know, they’re made out of steel and they wear out.”

Offshore wind energy is currently quite expensive, but onshore wind — the type that makes up the vast majority of wind turbines in the U.S. — is on par with or cheaper than natural gas or coal plants. And neither type of wind energy is usually considered the most costly. Of the most common power types, nuclear energy is typically the most expensive.

The latest figures from Lazard and BloombergNEF (sent to us via email) for the levelized cost of electricity — a metric that provides the cost per unit of electricity generated after taking into account construction, maintenance and operation — both show that onshore wind is similar to or cheaper than natural gas or coal plants, even without subsidies. 

The Energy Information Administration’s levelized cost of electricity calculations, which include tax credits for wind, also show that onshore wind is typically cheaper than natural gas.

As we’ve written, the levelized cost of electricity doesn’t tell the full story because it ignores how much providers get paid for the electricity they produce. Since renewables such as wind are variable, they are not as valuable to the grid, so this can make investment in a wind farm less attractive for electricity providers. But levelized cost remains the standard measure used to evaluate the cost of various electricity sources.

As we’ve explained on numerous occasions, wind turbines do kill birds, but it’s not the bloodbath that Trump makes it out to be. Other causes, including cats and collisions with buildings or vehicles, kill far more birds every year.

Trump’s claim about a nine-year interval for replacing turbines is also overblown. Turbines typically last 20 to 30 years, although some parts have to be replaced before then. Turbines are made of steel, but also other metals, such as aluminum, copper and iron, which can be recycled, according to a wind energy end-of-service guide from the Department of Energy. 

The hardest parts of a wind turbine to reuse or recycle are the composite components, such as the blades, which are made out of fiberglass or other lightweight materials. Scientists, however, are working on developing new materials for these components that can more easily be recycled. In August, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory reported they had developed a plant-based recyclable material for turbine blades.

For his replacement interval, it’s possible Trump is thinking of turbine blades. The blades, which are not made of steel, typically last about 20 years, or even longer. Some blades, however, are replaced with larger ones after just 10 years or so. Contrary to Trump’s claims, this is not so much because they wear out, but because bigger blades generate more energy and can upgrade a turbine.

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