Here’s What Donald Trump Really Thinks of America’s Scientists
It was a bit more surprising, however, that Team Trump decided to use the opportunity to criticize the nation’s scientists. “Mr. Trump and Gov. Pence appreciate that many scientists are concerned about greenhouse gas emissions,” said the statement. It then added, “We need America’s scientists to continue studying the scientific issues but without political agendas getting in the way.”
A few months ago, the implication that scientists were skewing their results to match their supposed political agendas might have seemed like a relatively tame statement from Trump. After all, he spent years declaring that global warming is a “hoax” perpetrated by “scientists [who] are having a lot of fun.” In July, he defended his use of the word “hoax” by invoking the widely debunked “ClimateGate” scandal: “If you look at Europe where they had their big summit a couple of years ago, where people were sending out emails—scientists—practically calling it a hoax, and they were laughing at it.”
But more recently, Trump has been trying to run away from that rhetoric. During the first debate, Trump insisted (falsely) that he’d never described climate change as a Chinese hoax. The following day, Pence—who once described climate change as a “myth”—acknowledged that human activities do “have some impact on climate.” Regardless, it’s now clear that Trump still thinks scientists are lying to us.
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From Scientific American:
The current presidential race, however, is something special. It takes antiscience to previously unexplored terrain. When the major Republican candidate for president has tweeted that global warming is a Chinese plot, threatens to dismantle a climate agreement 20 years in the making and to eliminate an agency that enforces clean air and water regulations, and speaks passionately about a link between vaccines and autism that was utterly discredited years ago, we can only hope that there is nowhere to go but up.