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Trump Tweeted About The Polar Vortex — Then Twitter Schooled Him

BY January 29, 2019


President Donald Trump considers himself an expert on many topics.

He’s bragged in the past about being a “stable genius,” for example, and in November he suggested that he has “high levels of intelligence,” knowing better than to believe what scientists in his own administration told him about climate change, per reporting from New York magazine.

So it shouldn’t be surprising to see Trump weigh in on the topic yet again, this time implying that extreme cold temperatures hitting our country this week is evidence that warnings of global climate change and the overall warming of our planet are overblown.

“In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded,” Trump wrote in a tweet on Thursday evening. “What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!”

Is the weather that’s about to approach the Midwest a sign that the climate scientists have it all wrong? It’s not — and Twitter users far-and-wide were fast to correct Trump on his error (and not just his mistake in spelling warming as “waming”).

User @meatbirds, a self-described Wisconsinite, mentioned to Trump that weather and climate are not the same thing.

Indeed, weather is the change in temperatures and conditions you see from day-to-day, while climate are the patterns you would expect to see from season to season, year after year.

User David Slack (@slack2thefuture) also made the president aware that his tweet ignored fact-based evidence that climate change results in harsher weather conditions — stronger and more frequent hurricanes, more floodings, and yes, brutal winter storms.

A user from Australia, @vanbadham, pointed out that other parts of the world were experiencing terrifyingly high temperatures, citing 50 degree C temperatures in that nation’s summertime weather happening now (which translates to more than 120 degree F temperatures).

Perhaps the most enlightening tweet came from a user named “A Science Enthusiast” (@aSciEnthusiast). In their tweet, they delved into the mechanics of why a polar vortex happens in the first place. It’s not that the world is getting colder, they pointed out, but rather that the cold air that exists elsewhere has shifted to the Midwest temporarily.

Jason Samenow, the weather editor for the Washington Post, explained how climate change actually creates the phenomenon in a piece he penned more than two years ago. Samenow cited a study back in 2016 that seems to confirm @aSciEnthusiast’s statement directed toward Trump, that loss of sea ice in the Arctic causes warming oceans to shift cold air temperatures southward.

Trump’s quick observation about temperatures being colder — in fact, the coldest they’ve been in generations — isn’t wrong. But his rationale for why they’re happening, and his insistence that global warming could actually make things better, is errant. As National Geographic pointed out in an article from a week ago, the world is still much hotter on average, even with the arctic air that’s hitting the U.S.

Global warming wouldn’t “fix” the cold snap affecting the Midwest this week — in actuality, it’s partly to blame for the mess in the first place, according to scientific consensus on the matter.



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