„There is still hunger in the world, even if you just had a Big Mac,“ says Jon Foley, executive director of the California Academy of Sciences.
President Donald Trump ’s tweet suggesting that the nation’s cold snap disproves global warming has raised an outcry in response from climate scientists.
„There is still hunger in the world, even if you just had a Big Mac,“ said Jon Foley, executive director of the California Academy of Sciences.
Trump made his latest blast against global warming in a tweet Thursday.
„In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming,“ Trump wrote.
Climate scientists agree that global warming is real and that the driver is carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.
Shaena Montanari, a paleontologist and member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, tweeted that Trump was using circular reasoning, comparing his thoughts on the weather to issues of starvation and poverty.
The possibility of record low temperatures in some parts of the United States has drawn mass attention. Christopher Kucharik, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said more context is necessary, tweeting that „memory is short.“
University of Georgia meteorologist Marshall Shepherd noted that there were „far more record highs than record lows in 2017.“
The day before Trump’s tweet, the weather division of The Washington Post, known as the „Capital Weather Gang,“ wrote in a tweet that the U. S. will be the „coldest region in world relative to normal over next week.“
„Please note rest of world will be much warmer than normal lest anyone try to claim pocket of cold in U. S. debunks global warming, which they will invariably and irresponsibly do,“ Capital Weather said.
This is far from the first time Trump expressed skepticism about climate change. In 2012, he called global warming a „hoax“ that the Chinese created in an effort to hurt the American economy. Vox in June collected 115 times Trump tweeted skepticism about climate change, saying his consistency matched with his decision at the time to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, which aims to curb carbon emissions.
According to the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, the 10 hottest years ever measured were in the last two decades — with the top three being 2014 through 2016. Shepherd told USA Today that weekly weather patterns „say nothing about longer term climate change.“
„The clothes that you have on today do not describe what you have in your closet but rather how you dressed for today’s weather. The range of clothing that you have in your closet is climate,“ Shepherd said.
