Trump repeatedly denies climate science and says ‘we shouldn’t be worried about global warming’

Donald Trump once again denied climate science and reiterated that the world shouldn’t be worried about global warming.

The former president said at a Fox News town hall: “The only global warming we should be thinking about and worrying about because it is gonna happen tomorrow, is nuclear global warming not global warming.”

He had previously said that scientists rebranded global warming as climate change.

“You know they don’t call it global warming so much now, they call it climate change because it wasn’t working… Global warming wasn’t working when it was cooling. So now they call it climate change, that takes care of everything,” he said.

However, both terms are used interchangeably, with experts at Nasa arguing that climate change is the more scientifically accurate phrase.

Mr Trump had previously called climate change a “make-believe problem”, a “canard”, “nonexistent” and “a very, very expensive form of tax”.

The former president also attacked US climate envoy John Kerry during the town hall and alleged that “he is destroying our country”.

Mr Trump said: “John Kerry has to be stopped. He is destroying our country.”

Mr Kerry was asked at the Bloomberg Green summit at COP28 in Dubai about the prospect of Mr Trump returning to the White House. “That nightmarish prospect,” he said with a shudder. “I’m not allowed to comment on politics, actually,” he said and added, “My body language was enough of it”.

Scientists across the globe overwhelmingly agree that the emissions generated by human activities are causing a rise in global temperatures, leading to the warming of the planet and the climate crisis that is already affecting millions of people worldwide through extreme weather events.

He has, over the years, made light of the climate crisis that the world is facing and, in 2012, he in fact made a statement suggesting that climate change was “created by and for the Chinese to make US manufacturing non-competitive”. He later said the remark was meant as a joke.

He has posted numerous tweets on X/Twitter implying that cold weather contradicts the concept of climate change, even though the World Meteorological Organization has reported that the 20 warmest years on record occurred in the past 22 years.

He said: “We have to fire up our factories. Wind is not going to fire up our factories and it’s the most expensive energy, even solar. I like solar from a concept standpoint, but it’s massively expensive and we can’t allow China to build a factory a week and we do nothing. They build a coal plant and they’re obvious about it. And then [Joe] Biden goes to see them about global warming.”

The former president has been called a “climate nihilist” by Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard’s environmental law programme, who told BBC once that Mr Trump “believes nothing on climate change”.