In a recent address to the U.N., President Donald Trump made many claims about his views on climate change and efforts to curb pollution. However, independent fact-checking by FactCheck.org revealed that many of his statements are incorrect. Despite his claims, global warming and climate change are real and are caused by human activity, and there are many reasonable steps we can take to address them.
The central message that Trump tried to push in his address was that the Earth’s rising temperature is a “hoax.” He claimed that a century ago, Earth’s temperature was dropping, and that it is dropping again. However, this is not true. As FactCheck.org detailed, the hottest years ever on record are 2024, 2023, 2020, and 2016, in that order. The temperature is not rising at a constant rate; however, we are frequently setting new records for hotter and hotter temperatures, as the global average continues to rise.
Higher temperatures pose problems for several reasons. They lead to less stable weather patterns and more frequent disasters, harming agriculture and diminishing our food supply. Diseases spread more easily, and those are just the direct impacts on humanity; plants and animals all around the globe are also harmed.
Countries around the world have been working to reduce air pollution —the number one way we can help lower Earth’s temperature. However, Trump slammed these efforts in his address.
He falsely claimed that China exports windmills but generally doesn’t use them, when in fact, according to FactCheck.org, China controls 44% of the planet’s wind power capacity. His insinuation was that wind is inferior and the country manufacturing the equipment knows this, but in fact, wind is one of the best sources of affordable clean energy. Trump claimed that coal is a clean source of energy when it is a significantly polluting option, and falsely said that America has paid $1 trillion for efforts to stop climate change — the real number is much lower. Interestingly, Trump wanted to portray his preferred source of energy as clean on the one hand, while also dismissing the impact of dirty energy on the other.
Trump also claimed that scientists now speak of “climate change” rather than “global warming” because the temperature of the earth has both increased and decreased in recent history, and being non-specific allows them to be right no matter what happens to the temperature. In reality, “climate change” is a separate, more general term that includes global warming, but also includes other related phenomena like sea level rise; scientists also continue to speak about global warming when talking about the temperature specifically.
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The best way to avoid being fooled by this kind of misinformation is to educate yourself about the issues. That way, you will have a better sense of who is sharing facts and who is spewing fiction.
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