A few weeks back, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a fairly devastating report. According to the group’s research, humanity only has about a decade to take “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” or else face global, catastrophic climate change.
The world was reasonably freaked the fuck out about the findings, and moms across America leapt to Facebook to post apocalyptic statuses or whatever, but one man seemed entirely unfazed by the report: Trump. The president waved off the entire report during a recent interview with Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes, saying the scientists’ findings were based on a “very big political agenda,” and left it at that.
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But on Tuesday, Trump gave us a deeper look into why, exactly, he doesn’t think climate change is such a big issue—because his “natural instinct” tells him so, AP reports.
“You have scientists on both sides of [climate change],” Trump told the Associated Press during an interview. “My uncle was a great professor at MIT for many years: Dr. John Trump. And I didn’t talk to him about this particular subject, but I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture.”
That would make perfect sense, of course, if scientific knowledge was normally passed through the bloodline and science is really just the art of trusting your gut and calling it good. But it’s not. The UN report was compiled by 91 scientists from 40 countries who analyzed more than 6,000 scientific studies, and actively choosing to ignore a global coalition of experts—including ones within our own government—is just dangerous and stupid. But, of course, that means little to Trump, who basically just decided to recycle that same rhetoric he used after Charlottesville to say that there are somehow two sides to fact-based science.
During the interview, Trump also claimed that he is “truly an environmentalist” and said that, yes, while he can agree on the fact that the climate changes, it also “goes back and forth, back and forth,” so we shouldn’t sweat it too hard. Again, this is all based on his “natural instinct,” which apparently supersedes whatever UN scientists prepared that harrowing report. These are the same natural instincts that previously led Trump to stare directly at the sun during a solar eclipse and believe that exercise is bad because humans have finite energy, so take that as you will.
Really, the lesson here is clear—do what you can to mitigate climate change before 2030, folks. Because the rest of the century could get very, very rough, regardless of what the instincts Trump supposedly inherited from his smart uncle might be telling him.
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