Trump Such a Fool on Climate Internet Forced to Ask: How Can 'Global Waming' Tweet Not Be a Troll?

The Midwestern United States is currently enduring life-threatening cold temperatures—which these days all but ensures, as so many climate reporters and experts anticipated, an ignorant and even infuriating tweet from President Donald Trump conflating weather and climate.

Late Monday, Trump tweeted about the brutal and dangerous wind chills hitting the middle of the country, and even asked global “waming” (sic) to “please come back fast.”

The Toronto Star‘s Washington correspondent, Daniel Dale, publicly grappled with whether Trump’s latest foolish remarks deserved any attention. As he noted, “Trump’s climate-trolling is such obvious outrage bait that you almost want to ignore it, but it’s also self-provided evidence of one of the most significant ignorance crises of his presidency, so I dunno.”

“There he goes again,” tweeted New York Times climate reporter Henry Fountain. “He’s consistent, give him that,” noted John Schwartz, also of the Times, linking to an article from December of 2017 titled, “It’s Cold Outside. Cue the Trump Global Warming Tweet.”

The president’s position has shifted slightly on the global climate crisis, from claiming it is a myth made up by China, to telling CBS‘s “60 Minutes” in an October interview: “Something’s changing and it’ll change back again. I don’t think it’s a hoax… But I don’t know that it’s manmade. I will say this. I don’t wanna give trillions and trillions of dollars.”

His administration, meanwhile, has ignored growing demands from scientists and the American public for urgent action to scale back the United States’ rising greenhouse gas emissions—instead working at the behest of polluting industries to destroy dozens of environmental regulations designed to curb the crisis.

Some who responded to Trump’s Monday night tweet simply laid out the facts. Chris Gloninger, a meteorologist from NBC10 Boston, pointed out in a pair of tweets that climate and weather are not synonymous, and “climate change means EXTREME weather, which includes record cold weather as well.”