Trump Parrots Anti-Science Misinformation As He Readies Climate Change Panel

The president shared global warming skeptic Patrick Moore’s theories with his more than 58 million followers.
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President Donald Trump on Tuesday once again used his Twitter platform to share misinformation about climate change to his 59 million followers, quoting a “Fox & Friends” guest who falsely claimed global warming isn’t caused by man and could actually benefit many people.

Former Greenpeace Canada President Patrick Moore, a longtime nuclear energy industry shill, denied that human activity fuels climate change and claimed the phenomenon doesn’t pose an imminent danger to life on earth, despite the mountains of scientific evidence that suggest otherwise.

He dubbed the climate crisis as “fake news” and chalked up the catastrophic rise in global warming over the last few decades as simply “weather.”

“Wow!” the president wrote in his tweet Tuesday quoting Moore’s Fox News appearance.

Though Trump and Fox News described Moore as a co-founder of Greenpeace, a major environmental advocacy group that supports climate change science, the organization has long denied such a characterization.

“Although Mr. Moore played a significant role in Greenpeace Canada for several years, he did not found Greenpeace,” the group said in a statement in 2010, adding that Moore often “misrepresents” himself in the media as an environmental “expert” despite his anti-science views.

“Patrick Moore has been a paid spokesman for a variety of polluting industries for more than 30 years, including the timber, mining, chemical and the aquaculture industries,” according to the statement.

After leaving Greenpeace in the mid-1980s, Moore co-chaired the nuclear energy front group Clean and Safe Energy Coalition until 2013. He pledged to remain an active member of the group following his resignation.

He is both a policy adviser at the right-wing libertarian Heartland Institute, a group at the front of the climate denial movement, and a board member of the CO2 Coalition, a fringe think tank that argues humans and the planet benefit from carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere.

The CO2 Coalition emerged from the shadows in the weeks since news broke that Trump is preparing to convene an ad-hoc panel of scientists and researchers to challenge the scientific consensus that climate change is an immediate crisis driven by fossil fuels.

The panel will conduct “adversarial scientific peer review” of near-universally accepted climate science, according to reporting by E&E News. One of its primary targets being the National Climate Assessment, a federal report released in November that concluded planetary warming “could increase by 9°F (5°C) or more by the end of this century” if governments don’t implement dramatic emission reductions.

Trump’s reported pick to lead the committee is William Happer, a retired Princeton physics professor with no expertise in climatology. Happer co-founded the CO2 Coalition in 2015 and now serves as Trump’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies on the National Security Council. He had called climate science a “cult,” claimed Earth is in the midst of a “CO2 famine, and said the “demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”

Also being considered for a spot on the White House panel is retired MIT professor Richard Lindzen. Lindzen is both on CO2 Coalition’s board of directors and a distinguished senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C., that is funded by the fossil-fuel billionaire Koch brothers.

Moore took the opportunity during his Fox & Friends interview Tuesday to give a plug for the CO2 Coalition.

“We believe that carbon dioxide is entirely beneficial to both the environment, to agriculture and forestry and to the climate of the earth,” he said, urging viewers to visit the group’s website.

Watch Moore’s appearance on “Fox & Friends” below around the 26:50 mark.

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