Trump’s Cold-Snap Tweet Is Even More Shamelessly Stupid Than You Had First Thought. Here’s Why.

Will he ever learn the difference between weather and climate?

People visit the Niagara Falls during extreme cold weather as sub-zero temperatures are expected across Canada and the United States on New Year's Eve and New Year's day. Rex Features via AP Images

This story was originally published by The Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As morning temperatures across the U.S. broke records Monday―residents of Watertown, New York, woke up to minus 31 degrees Fahrenheit and temperatures plunged to minus 19 degrees in Des Moines, Iowa―many other parts of the world were warmer than usual.

Huge sections of the Arctic were among the areas that saw temperatures well above average, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, which compares daily temperature anomalies to a baseline of data from between 1979 and 2000.

Temperatures around the globe were nearly one full degree Fahrenheit, or 0.5 degrees Celsius, above average on Monday. The Northern Hemisphere, which is currently experiencing winter, was 1.6 degrees F (0.9 degrees Celsius) warmer than usual. In Antarctica, where a Delaware-sized iceberg broke off last summer, temperatures were 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees C) higher than normal. And the Arctic, which is warming about twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet, started 2018 with temperatures 6.8 degrees F (3.4 degrees C) warmer than average.

A peer-reviewed report released last month by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that the Arctic is warming faster than at any point in the past 1,500 years, with 2017 its hottest year on record.

The frigid cold across much of the continental United States appears to be American Exceptionalism.

Climate Reanalyzer, Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, USA.

Still, President Donald Trump―who gutted environmental regulations and attacked efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions during his first year in office―has seized on the cold snap in the northern Midwest and eastern United States in an attempt to refute the existence climate change.

In a tweet on Thursday, the president conflated cold winter weather with climate, and suggested that the nonbinding Paris Agreement―from which he announced plans to withdraw in June―would cost the United States trillions of dollars. In reality, the U.S. contributed just $1 billion to the $100 billion Green Climate Fund set up under the Paris climate accord to help poorer countries invest in renewable energy and forgo coal-fired plants.

“This one-week cold snap or two weeks, as it might end up being, isn’t going to change anything about any global climate signal,” Ryan Maue, an Atlanta-based meteorologist at Weather.us, told HuffPost.

“When you have these cold events, how do you place these in a climate context?” he added. “This is just a typical January cold outbreak, and we still have record cold sometimes.”

Breitbart’s James Delingpole, a conspiracy theorist and columnist who made his name attacking scientists, interpreted Trump’s tweet as the president “trolling his enemies like a boss” and baiting “climate loons.”

“What normal people are seeing right now when they look out of their windows is weather so cold that the very last thing on their minds is trying to prevent ‘global warming,’” he wrote.

However, weather and climate are two different things. Weather describes conditions of the atmosphere over a short period of time, while climate denotes long-term trends in how the atmosphere behaves, according to a succinct summary that has been available on NASA’s website since February 2005.

Sixteen of the 17 hottest years in NASA’s 137-year record have occurred since 2001. The warmest year on record is 2016, and 2017 is in second place.

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate