Trump Says Climate Is Both ‘Cooling’ and ‘Heating.’ He’s Only Half Right.

When President Donald Trump sat down with the British interviewer Piers Morgan for a wide-ranging conversation that was broadcast Sunday night, Morgan asked about climate change. The entire exchange was fewer than 350 words, but those 350 words were rich in misinformation.

Trump has spoken often about climate change and often his arguments have little in common with the overwhelming scientific evidence that the climate is changing and humans are the primary cause. Instead, he tends to offer cherry-picked facts that do not stand up to scrutiny.

Here are excerpts from the interview, with comments by The New York Times.

And later in the interview:

Trump has often cited clean air and water as his highest environmental priority. But his administration has sought to roll back more than 60 environmental rules, and many of those reversals have the potential to substantially degrade the quality of air and water.

Though Trump announced last year that the United States would withdraw from the landmark Paris climate accord, the nation is not yet out. Approved by nearly 200 nations in December 2015, the rules of the deal allow no one to pull out before Nov. 4, 2020.

Trump continues to call the agreement unfair. “We had a horrible deal,” he said later in the exchange. “As usual, they took advantage of the United States. We were in a terrible deal.”

Yet the Paris agreement treated the United States no differently than other nations, and imposed no obligations on the United States to reduce greenhouse gases or to fund efforts by other nations to do the same; the pledges were voluntary and nonbinding.

Trump was correct, in a way, in saying there could be a way back into the agreement. All he has to do is not leave it. The United States could adjust its pledges for curbing emissions, if it so chose. A future president could also re-enter the deal.

When Trump says “there is a cooling and there is a heating,” it could be a rehash of the argument among denialists that the climate has shifted enormously over millenniums. This is true, but it is not what scientists are referring to when they talk about human-caused climate change.

The current, much faster warming trend, which has been well established, is inextricably linked to greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide that humans have been pumping into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial age.

The rest of his comments on climate change are of a piece with Trump’s scorn for climate science, which he has famously referred to as a hoax created by the Chinese. The idea that climate scientists changed the name from “global warming” to “climate change” because of cold weather is simply wrong. Both terms are still in use, and climate change is part of the name of organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change under the United Nations, named in 1988. While global warming refers to rising temperatures, climate change covers other effects, like an increase in severe weather events. And even as Earth gets warmer, scientists still expect cold snaps, just fewer of them.

As for the ice caps, Arctic sea ice is indeed setting records — but for loss, not gain. The sea ice on the top of Earth has been on an unmistakable downward trend, which is consistent with the greater concentration of warming in the northern hemisphere. The story on Antarctic sea ice is more mixed, with some areas of ice growth in recent years — a period of growth that appears to have ended.