“The greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world… The carbon footprint is a hoax, made up by people with evil intentions, and they’re heading down a path of total destruction…
“The concept of asking successful industrialised nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely and totally.”
Readers will know where these words came from. President Donald Trump’s rambling, hour-long speech to the United Nations last week will be remembered for its jingoism and the contempt it showed for the world body hosting him. His antagonism is no surprise in light of the 2022 remark by UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres that “the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.”
Facing a credibility deficit, climate change deniers have been looking for a saviour to spearhead their ceaseless battle to replace objective science with their own imagined alternative. After a number of false starts they now believe they have found one, in the person of Donald Trump and all the power and resources the US presidency can bring to bear.
But the global climate system stops for no-one, not even Donald Trump. The US president remains oblivious to all this, but for the benefit of readers here’s a taste of what’s happening now around the world, the big trends that lie behind every daily weather forecast.
Centuries of temperature data are now being rewritten every year. Last year saw over 15,000 daily heat records broken, some by margins as high as 8C. Since 2000, temperature records have been broken five times more often than was normal throughout the 20th century.
For every 1C of warming, the atmosphere holds seven per cent more water. Atmospheric rivers – narrow corridors of concentrated water vapour that carry several times the flow of the Amazon – are now substantially bigger than they were last century, leading to ever-more devastating rain and flood events.
Rainfall patterns are getting more unpredictable, never more so than last year with some regions receiving three times their average rainfall at the same time as drought records were broken elsewhere. Dry parts are getting drier and wet places wetter in an intensifying global water cycle, with a rising “whiplash” phenomenon of record flood followed by record drought, or vice-versa.
Melting polar and mountain ice has seen the average rate of global sea level rise double over the past two decades to 4.5 mm a year. Every year the global ocean is breaking heat records. Average sea surface temperatures globally are now above 21C globally. Parts of the ocean – including seas lapping eastern Tasmania – are much warmer. In July 2023 the Mediterranean Sea averaged nearly 32C.
A warming Southern Ocean is causing faster melting around Antarctica’s margins and dramatically less winter sea ice. Throughout this century but especially since 2019, the Arctic has seen temperatures go well beyond historical norms – in some parts as much as 7C higher. A big factor is reduced albedo, hence greater heat absorption, as melting ice exposes darker surfaces underneath.
Increasing instability of the Arctic polar vortex, bringing cold air to warm parts of the US and prolonged heatwaves on three continents, has become a feature of Northern Hemisphere climate. Now the normally rock-solid Antarctic polar vortex is showing signs of instability, with rare strong stratospheric temperature and pressure waves currently developing above the South Pole.
All our climate and weather information comes courtesy of a global network of individuals and organisations driven by one overarching goal, to understand ourselves and our world. That same goal, the same scientific discipline, produced the life-saving treatments which long ago protected a child named Donald from polio, and the man from Covid when he was president in 2020.
What Donald Trump says about climate has no more scientific basis than his claim, in lockstep with his health secretary Robert Kennedy, that a certain painkiller taken during pregnancy can cause autism in unborn children. His authority is not painstaking peer-reviewed science but himself, the man who offered bleach as a Covid cure.
As citizens in a democracy we are duty-bound to look beyond the confined, protected, padded worlds of our leaders. We rightly expect them to understand, as we do, that no individual is the source of all knowledge and wisdom. The president’s rejection of expert advice is deplorable.
If there’s one thing that pushes Donald Trump’s buttons it’s owning property, and his most valued possession is a coastal mansion in the heart of America’s hurricane zone. In the dark underworld of climate denial, that would make him the greatest denier of all time. He should put it on a baseball cap.