Dismissing the claim made in the now-infamous tweet by President-elect Donald Trump, China says it didn’t fabricate the concept of climate change—and pointed to two Republican icons as its evidence. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said in Morocco on Wednesday that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush started the global-warming conversation in the late 1980s and that the concept is not a “hoax” perpetuated by the Chinese government. The initial panel on climate change began as a joint project between the UN Environmental Program and the World Meteorological Organization during Reagan’s presidency. Since that time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007—has published five reports, using findings from global climate experts, to create a “full scientific and technical assessment of climate change.” Liu said, “If you look at the history of climate-change negotiations, actually it was initiated by the IPCC with the support of the Republicans during the Reagan and senior Bush administration during the late 1980s.” Trump has not yet replied—on Twitter or otherwise—to Liu’s statement. Trump’s original tweet has garnered more than 104,000 retweets in four years.
