The leaders of some nations are watching as rising seas threaten to engulf their homes. Others are witnessing the deaths of their citizens as a result of climate change-exacerbated heat waves, floods, and hurricanes. However, the U.S. President Donald Trump described in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday didn’t match the one many world leaders in the audience are contending with. It also did not match what scientists have been observing for a long time. “This ‘climate change,’ it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion,” Trump said. “All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people who have hurt their nations’ chances of success and cost them a lot of money. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”
Trump has long been a critic of climate science and polices aimed at helping the world transition to green energies like wind and solar. However, his speech on Tuesday was one of his longest to date. Ilana Seid, an ambassador from Palau and head of the organization of small island states, was in the audience. It included making false statements and making connections between things that are not connected. She said it’s what they’ve come to expect from Trump and the United States. She added that not acting on climate change will “be a betrayal of the most vulnerable,” a sentiment echoed by Evans Davie Njewa of Malawi, who said that “we are endangering the lives of innocent people in the world.”
For Adelle Thomas, a climate scientist who has published more than 40 studies and has a doctorate, climate change disasters are personal, too. A vice chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s top body on climate science, Thomas is from the Bahamas and said she experienced firsthand “the devastation of the climate disaster” when Hurricane Sandy hit the Caribbean and New York City, the city Trump was speaking from, in 2012.“ She continued, “The devastation that climate change has brought to their lives can already be attested to by millions of people around the world.” ‘The evidence is not abstract. It is lived, it is deadly, and it demands urgent action.”
As some nations face destruction, UN listens to Trump decry climate ‘scam’
