The Patriot Post® · Trump's Climate Tweet Was Right on Target
By Vijay Jayaraj
In Florida over the holidays, President Trump tweeted, “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 that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!”
The tweet should not surprise anyone. During his presidential run, Trump promised to take down climate policies that posed a threat to development and didn’t serve the wellbeing of American citizens.
After coming to power, he fulfilled that promise, initiating steps to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement and end the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan.
The Paris agreement required the U.S. and other industrialized countries to shell out trillions of dollars over this century to developing countries such as India, which were required to make a mandatory transition from conventional coal-based energy to more expensive and unreliable wind and solar.
Proponents, led by the United Nations, claimed that unless we reduce carbon dioxide emission from fossil fuels, global temperatures will rise to dangerous levels.
However, the alarmist claims are based on faulty computer models, which in the past 39 years have predicted two-thirds more warming than actually observed.
Some of the best climate scientists do not support the apocalyptic forecasts, and the staunchest alarmists themselves acknowledged the bankruptcy of these climate models.
The temperatures showed no significant increase in the past 20 years, and there are no scientific reasons to believe that they will increase dramatically in the future.
President Trump’s tweet follows record low temperatures this winter in the U.S. and Canada. Trump is right in his assertion — taxpayer dollars should not be wasted on international programs based on ambiguous scientific hypotheses that systematically contradict real-life temperature levels by a wide margin.
Although record lows do not invalidate or refute the alarmist hypothesis, they do expose the alarmist claim of temperatures rising to levels dangerous enough to disrupt life on earth.
The “record lows” and “record highs” the media trumpet are records only for the instrumental period — the last 150 years. But global temperatures have been changing continuously in the past 2,000 years and more, with the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age being much warmer and much colder, respectively.
In fact, global temperature has been on a warming trend since the Little Ice Age ended in the 18th century. The warming trend in the last three centuries has been like other warming trends in the past.
The global warming alarmists must stop calling every record high temperature catastrophic. Moreover, political leaders of the world must stop wasting trillions of dollars on policies that harm rather than help humanity.
Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), Research Associate for Developing Countries for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, lives in New Delhi, India.