Trump doesn’t believe govt climate warning

President Donald Trump said Monday he doesn’t believe his own government’s report last week warning of massive economic losses if carbon emissions continue to feed climate change unchecked. “I don’t believe it,” Trump said at the White House, adding that the United States would not take measures to cut emissions if the same was not done in other countries. Trump said he had read “some” of the report and that it was “fine.”

However, he rejected the central warning in the National Climate Assessment, which said there will be hundreds of billions of dollars in losses by the end of the century due to climate change “without substantial and sustained global mitigation.” “No, no, I don’t believe it,” he repeated. “You’re going to have to have China and Japan and all of Asia and all of these other countries, you know. It addresses our country,” he said.

“Right now, we’re at the cleanest we’ve ever been. And that’s very important to me. But if we’re clean, but every other place on Earth is dirty, that’s not so good. So I want clean air, I want clean water, very important.” According to the report, released Friday, “with continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century -- more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many US states.”

Compiled by more than 300 scientists, the Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II is a congressionally-mandated report that spans more than 1,000 pages. Trump has long said he distrusts the consensus by nearly all the world’s respected climate scientists on the link between human activity and rising temperatures, as well as other damaging climate change phenomena.