It was a horrifying year for the climate. California faced its deadliest wildfire in modern recorded history. Ice caps continued to melt at near record-breaking rates. And according to damning reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—and Trump’s own administration—it’s only going to get worse.
But rather than address the problem head-on, Trump and other right-wing climate deniers made matters worse by spreading backwards, misleading, and downright dangerous claims. Here are six of the worst offenders.
The Ice Caps Are ‘Setting Records’
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What they said:
President Trump kicked off 2018’s climate misinformation cycle in a Jan. 28 interview with British broadcaster Piers Morgan. He hawked a series of falsehoods throughout the interview—including that climate change could “go back” and that scientists have a “political agenda”—but the most egregious was his statement about polar ice.
When asked by Morgan if he believed in climate change, Trump wavered at first, according to video from the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There is a cooling and there is a heating,” he replied tentatively. But seconds later, he used polar ice to insist that climate change can’t be as bad as scientists say.
“The ice caps were going to melt,” he told Morgan. “They were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records, OK, they’re at a record level.”
Why it’s wrong:
Trump’s statement is “false in every possible way of interpreting or parsing it,” according to Michael Mann, the director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center. Generally, Mann explained via email, the term “ice caps” is used to refer to sea ice—in other words, the frozen water that floats on the ocean’s surface.
That sea ice “is decreasing at a rate that is well beyond what models predicted,” Mann said. Data from NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center supports this assertion: on February 13, 2017, combined Arctic and Antarctic sea ice levels hit their lowest point since satellites began gathering data in 1979. So technically, Trump is correct—the ice is setting record levels—but it’s a record low.
Mann noted that Trump could have been mistakenly referring to the continental ice sheets, the giant masses of ice that have contributed to sea level rise. But even in that case, he’s dead wrong: “The rate of ice loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet has increased by a factor of three over the past decade alone,” Mann said.
President Obama’s Fuel Efficiency Standards Could Kill
What they said:
In an attempt to gut an Obama-era plan to curb vehicle emissions, President Trump pushed a bizarre bit of misinformation: reducing fuel emissions, a vital step in fighting global warming, could actually lead to more deaths.
The alleged logic, advanced in a draft proposal for Trump’s plan to freeze Obama’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, was this: If people have cars with a poor mileage per gallon, they’ll drive less—meaning they’re less likely to get into a crash.
Why it’s wrong:
When the excerpts of the draft proposal leaked, engineering experts immediately rebutted Trump’s claim. “To say that safety is a direct result of somehow freezing the fuel economy mandate for a few years, I think that’s a stretch,” the director of the Center for Automotive Research at Ohio State University told the Associated Press.
This misinformation is particularly offensive for another reason: It’s clear that freezing Obama’s standards, as Trump proposed, will kill people. Even his own National Traffic Highway Safety Administration admitted that if the proposal passes, the uptick in pollution could lead to up to 299 additional premature deaths each year by the middle of the century.
America’s Air Quality Is The Best ‘BY FAR!’
What they said:
In late October, Trump took to Twitter to congratulate himself for the quality of America’s air.
“America: the Cleanest Air in the World - BY FAR!” Trump boasted. The map accompanying the tweet appeared to show that unlike countries in Africa and the Middle East, the United States had only trace amounts of PM 2.5—a group of tiny pollutants that can cause cardiac and respiratory disease.
“91% of the world’s population (none in the U.S.) are exposed to air pollution concentrations above WHO suggested level,” proclaimed Trump’s caption, which was superimposed on the map.
Why it’s wrong:
As The Daily Beast previously reported, many things are wrong with this picture. The data used to make the map is from 2016, when Obama was president. The U.S. is 10th place when it comes to clean air, not first. Forty-five American cities have air pollution that exceeds the WHO standard.
And most importantly, air pollution has only gotten worse since Trump took office—and it’s still a major danger for Americans.
“Air pollution is still a major killer today, even though most places in the U.S. do meet our EPA standards and do meet the WHO guidelines,” Joshua Apte, an assistant professor of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas, told The Daily Beast at the time.
Pollution levels “even well below the WHO guidelines” can still be hazardous to human health, Apte explained. By his estimate, the average American’s life is reduced by four months due to outdoor air pollution. That’s nothing to celebrate.
Wildfires Are The Result of ‘Gross Mismanagement’
What they said:
This year, California suffered through one of its deadliest fire seasons on record. More than 1.5 million acres burned, and dozens of people were killed as fires ravaged the state. And amidst the chaos and devastation, President Trump knew exactly what to blame: forest management.
“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” Trump tweeted on Nov. 10. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”
Why it’s wrong:
The public immediately pushed back on Trump’s claims. Researchers reiterated the well-known link between climate change and wildfires. Scientists pointed out that California suffered through an "unprecedented season" of drought that only exacerbated the problem. Others noted that in many of the regions that burned, there weren’t even forests.
And most importantly, policy experts noted that as early as August—even before the Camp Fire claimed at least 88 lives and caused what’s likely billions of dollars in damage—California was already running out of money to fight the historic blazes. Pulling federal support like Trump suggested wouldn’t just avoid the problem, experts said. It would actively make it worse.
There Can’t Be Global Warming If It’s Cold Out
What they said:
When it comes to cold weather, conservative pundits move like clockwork: After every major snowstorm, someone appears to claim that global warming has been debunked once and for all.
After January’s bomb cyclone killed 22 people, for example Fox News’ Pete Hegseth encouraged Trump to “take credit for solving global warming.” When another cold front hit two months later, Sean Hannity used it to argue that “they do lie to us about global warming.” The phenomenon has become so common that MSNBC’s Chris Hayes gave it a name back in 2014: snow-trolling.
Snow-trolling reached this year’s peak in November, just days after the White House quietly dropped the U.S. National Climate Assessment, one of the most damning climate reports to date. In the assessment, the government acknowledged that climate change is already causing major economic losses, making Americans sick, and polluting our air and water.
That Sunday, the American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka discussed the report on Meet the Press. “I’m not a scientist,” Pletka told Chuck Todd, before insisting that “We need to also recognize we had two of the coldest years, biggest drop in global temperatures that we have had since the 1980s, the biggest in the last 100 years,” she said. “We don't talk about that.”
Why it’s wrong:
Snow-trolling ignores a basic meteorological fact: Weather and climate aren’t the same thing. Weather—the conditions we experience on a day to day basis—will always fluctuate, and it’s not at all surprising that it’s still cold in the winter. But the data shows that our climate—which measures long-term changes in the weather—has been warming at an increasingly rapid rate over the last century.
And in recent years, as snow-trolling has reached its prime, the data is even clearer. The three hottest years on record in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 138 years of records were 2015, 2016, and 2017.
Scientists Are Just In It For The Money
What they said:
On the same day that Pletka brought snow-trolling to Meet the Press, former Senator Rick Santorum bashed climate scientists on CNN.
“If there was no climate change, we’d have a lot of scientists looking for work. The reality is that a lot of these scientists are driven by the money they receive,” Santorum said, according to a clip of the interview featured in a biting thread from Media Matters news director John Whitehouse. “And of course they don’t receive money from corporations, Exxon and the like, because it’s tainted, but they can receive it from people who support their agenda, and that, I believe, is what’s really going on here.”
Other conservative pundits echoed Santorum in the days that followed. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay called the report “nothing more than a rehash of age-old 10- to 20-year assumptions made by scientists that get paid to further the politics of global warming.” Author Stephen Moore went as far as to decry the “climate change industrial complex.”
Why it’s wrong:
Katharine Hayhoe, one of the climate scientists who authored the White House report, rebuked Santorum directly on Twitter. “Apparently Rick Santorum thinks that we climate scientists who were paid ZERO DOLLARS to write the #NationalClimateAssessment are ‘driven by money,’” she wrote.
In an interview with CNN, Hayhoe expanded her rebuttal: “I got paid zero dollars to write this report, and honestly, I could have spent those hundreds of hours elsewhere,” she told host Anderson Cooper. “We don't do this for the money. We do it because we're physicians of the planet. We understand that our planet is running a fever. The impacts are serious and will become dangerous, and we have to act now, not for the good of the planet but for the good of every single human who lives on it.”
Unfortunately, it the responsibility to be the physicians of the planet will likely fall squarely on scientists’ belabored shoulders. Trump’s response to the report?
“I don’t believe it.”
