President Donald Trump delivered to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) an address that was allergic to facts. Describing climate change as the “greatest con job perpetrated on the world”, he said that Europe’s decades-long trimming of its carbon footprint had come at the expense of shuttered factories and job losses. In his Luddite conception of the workings of climate change, scientists in the early half of the 20th century had said that global cooling “would kill the world” and when that did not happen they said global warming would. And because the world did not end, he reckons, dishonest scientists now refer to it as ‘climate change’ to sound correct irrespective of the outcome. Never mind the fact that the average global temperature dip of 0.1°C (from 1945-70) was attributed to an increase in sulphur emissions from burning coal. Never mind that there is an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that has, since the 1990s, provided a forum for thousands of scientists to tease apart the effects of natural variations in climate from that due to human-caused ones. Never mind that climate change — the term — means precisely that global warming does not mean hotter weather everywhere but a larger disruption in the circulation of ocean currents and, therefore, increasingly erratic weather.
Mr. Trump’s chagrin is less about the subtleties of climate than it is about what it means to the fossil fuel industry. To him, the increasing adoption of solar and wind energy was evidence of countries being on the “brink of destruction” because of pursuing a “green agenda”. That the President of a country, which once led the science of parsing the subtleties of anthropogenic warming, would, one day, stand on one of the world’s most prestigious podiums to undermine it, shows that deference to scientific wisdom is a thing of the past. There are legitimate criticisms of the multi-lateral process in place to guide climate action, determining justice and equity in remedial action and whether the impact of the climate crisis is undermined, even by its adherents, by making it subservient to the zero-sum chicanery of trade protectionism. The perspective of the leader of the world’s largest economy on these would have been valuable. The complexity of weather changes means that it is reasonable to be perplexed about the mechanics of climate change. Painting it as a harbinger of a Mayan apocalypse has not helped either. Yet, it is clear that due to a slow accretion of hard evidence, falsifiable conjecture and measured prognosis, the scientific process is working the way it should. Despite its inefficiencies, the climate confabulation process has positioned the world towards a post-fossil-fuel future. No rant can change that.
Published – September 26, 2025 12:10 am IST
