Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has expressed strong skepticism about anthropogenic climate change, suggesting human influence is a “minor effect”, and that there are other priorities which deserve more attention.
HIATT: Last one: You think climate change is a real thing? Is there human-caused climate change?
TRUMP: I think there’s a change in weather. I am not a great believer in man-made climate change. I’m not a great believer. There is certainly a change in weather that goes – if you look, they had global cooling in the 1920s and now they have global warming, although now they don’t know if they have global warming. They call it all sorts of different things; now they’re using “extreme weather” I guess more than any other phrase. I am not – I know it hurts me with this room, and I know it’s probably a killer with this room – but I am not a believer. Perhaps there’s a minor effect, but I’m not a big believer in man-made climate change.
STROMBERG: Don’t good businessmen hedge against risks, not ignore them?
TRUMP: Well I just think we have much bigger risks. I mean I think we have militarily tremendous risks. I think we’re in tremendous peril. I think our biggest form of climate change we should worry about is nuclear weapons. The biggest risk to the world, to me – I know President Obama thought it was climate change – to me the biggest risk is nuclear weapons. That’s – that is climate change. That is a disaster, and we don’t even know where the nuclear weapons are right now. We don’t know who has them. We don’t know who’s trying to get them. The biggest risk for this world and this country is nuclear weapons, the power of nuclear weapons.
The other leading Republican Presidential Candidate, Senator Ted Cruz, has also expressed strong skepticism about anthropogenic climate change, and has made genuine efforts to hold climate scientists to account for their alarmist statements.
Nuclear weapons, particularly terrorist nukes, are, or should be, a growing concern. As WUWT detailed in a previous post, once a substantial amount of fissile material is in circulation, the threat it poses may hang over all of our heads for hundreds of years. Refining fissile material is incredibly difficult, but once produced, weapons grade fissiles are horribly easy to smuggle across international borders. When the material arrives at its intended target, assembling the fissile material into a nuclear bomb is something which could be performed in a normal suburban basement. Several rogue states with dubious links to terrorist organisations, appear to be doing everything in their power to produce fissile material which falls into this dangerous category.
Republican voters are in a fortunate position. While the leading presidential candidates are both strongly skeptical of the alleged dangers of anthropogenic climate change, Republicans had a real choice on this issue. There were other Republican candidates on offer, who expressed very different views about climate change – they had their opportunity to make their case.
Democrats have not been presented with a comparable set of options. Despite strong evidence that many Democrats are growing tired of their leadership putting climate corporate welfare ahead of jobs and the economy, as far as I can tell, the Democrat presidential candidate positions on climate change appear to be uniformly alarmist.
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Chances of catastrophic climate change within a hundred years, close to zero.
Chance of a city being wiped out by a nuke within a hundred years, closer to 100% than you dare to admit.
But even so it won’t change the climate.
So, is this your guy? Donald Trump! Really, as president!?!?
Trump Presidency Worst Outcome of 2016 General Elections: http://wp.me/p6EO97-Jk
Today Trump has the most votes and delegates.Nearest competitor, Cruz, needs 90% of delegates moving forward.
T. Madigan,
Is Hillary yours? ; )
No, I stand with Bernie Sanders, the only one fit to be president. This election has turned into a farce with a clown as Republican front runner and the others, trolls who couldn’t tie their shoes without help.
Trump Presidency Worst Outcome of 2016 General Elections: http://wp.me/p6EO97-Jk
“Seth” has been a member of the Church of Clmate since day one. He’s dug in so deeply there’s no chance he’ll ever back away. His ship, and the rest of his cult will go down with all flags flying. As such a firm believer, perhaps Seth can provide us with some empirical data showing that co2 has EVER had any impact on the global temperature. This is particularly difficult, given that, even over geologic periods, including when co2 level was 2,000+ ppmv, the only correlation tracking both up and down variation between co2 and temperature level shows temperature variation FIRST, with very similar co2 variation 800 to 2800 years LATER.
Then there is the cherry-picked start date for temperature increase as the mid 1800s, as the industrial revolution began cranking up — but wait — our current warming BEGAN, by definition, not in 1850, but at the bottom of the LIA in the mid 1600s. That’s 200 years of warming BEFORE co2 began rising. — but wait — there’s more — every warm body out there with an IQ greater than a potted plant understands that, at an annual average increase of 2ppmv per year, it would have taken another century of co2 increase before it could have possibly had any measurable impact on global warming. That brings us to about 1950, so now we see 300 years of natural temperature increase.
But from the 40s to the 70s was a (mild) cooling, so 320 years of natural warming. The only warming was between the mid 70s and 1998, followed (by our two weather satellites) with a hiatus until our current El Nino, which even NASA admits has nothing to do with human activity.
Then there are those embarassing recent exposures by receding glaciers in Alaska and the Alps, both showing uncovered trees, some splintered trunks still standing in their original positions (dated 1,000 years old at Mendenhall and 4,000 years old in the Alps. Anybody shrugging this off as anecdotal evidence fits that Marx brothers claim … believe them rather than your own lying eyes……
But it gets worse. These same alarmists cannot dare admit that the MWP was a global (not regional) event and as warm, likely warmer than now, in spite of the various peer-reviewed temperature studies performed around the world confirming the MWP was not just regional. (There’s also thousands of boreholes showing that same trend!).
Give us all a break Seth.
It has truly become a joke of epic proportions.
History will not treat this political mindf_cking kindly. It will go down as the penultimate example of deception in the least transparent administration ever.
Part of Trump’s statement on the climate I like is he is aware of the propaganda like nature of the discussion made clear by the shifting of terms over time.
In fact, that alone gives strong credence to an agenda based stance rather than science based stance.
Perhaps Donald is on to something.
(Global Warming to Climate Change to Extreme Weather………)
Trump seems to be very aware of the use of language and how it’s used to shape an issue. He loves to buck PC especially when the PC position is completely illogical. (like his comments about Brussels before the disaster) To a marketing person like Trump, seeing the obvious marketing of the warming cult diminishes it’s importance since he sees the marketing for what it is. It’s all just hype with an agenda behind it.
Paid trolls just add to the entertainment. (or unpaid religious fanatics whichever the current thread trolls are)
As far as the graph that started this all off? Cruz is clearly the most informed on the range of science on the issue and I’m encouraged by Trumps’ more recent statements.
The appeal to authority fallacy (the 8 “scientists”) that are the basis for the scoring of the candidates is simply a reflection of bias and not fact.
Ignoring the scientists or the stated methodology of the graph, you could easily nuance the same graph by simply asking, which candidates are most in line with the Guardian newspapers ideas concerning global warming, or is it climate change, or is it extreme weather….
Is the Guardian a scientist? See, no difference in the graphs results. The ‘appeal to authority’ just can delude some people to thinking the graph has some meaning. And since when are facts and science decided on how many people think this or that. Even the need to produce a graph like that with the appeal to authority speaks volumes.
There are graphs I do like, though. They have nothing to do with the rankings of unnamed scientists but are nice clear proxies of historical temperatures from multiple correlating sources and methods.
These graphs are paleo-climate graphs that show we are experience nothing special in our slight warming since the little ice age and even our current ‘peak’ is yet one of a continuing descent of peaks (Roman Period was warmer than now, Medieval Warming period was warmer than now, etc…) back to the inevitable return of the full ice age conditions which is the norm rather than these short little inter-glacials.
Is their a ‘human’ signal in all this or do we have an ability to geo-engineer the weather on this planet? I wish. No one is going to like it when we drift out of this inter-glacial.
What’s odd is many people that read this blog or comment are very environmentally concerned. But we place our concern in areas that are justified and not religious. I despise the bird and bat deaths that all the windmills cause in our area of the USA. I’ve seen this discussed here before and the general public don’t seem to realize the birds and bats to not have to be hit by a blade to be killed, just being in the shock wave zone can destroy their lungs. If an oil company was killing wildlife like these windmills they’d be suffering heavy fines. In some wind areas the government grants waivers for the birds killed when the windmills are killing endangered species.
I’m not a fan of what’s going on at all and will certainly vote for the candidate that is not religious in their view of science. Likely that’ll mean whomever ends up with the Republican nomination.
Thanks for the chart. Most helpful in confirming whom to vote for.