Good morning Mr President

To broaden the horizons of this blog briefly, I want to quickly focus upon the popularization of environmental and climate sciences, which has been taken on by the President of the United States of America, on his personal Twitter account (Fig.1). Unfortunately, to use a phrase he coined, what he is sharing is "fake news", worryingly his opinion on climate change is shared by prominent Australian politicians.

Figure 1. Tweet from Donald Trump on 28/12/2107, highlighting misguided and misleading information on climate change.

As demonstrated in Figure 1 there is a common misunderstanding between 'climate' and 'weather', where they are used interchangeably. Climate is a term used to define the average weather of a region over a given period, this is largely ~30 years, temperature is an aspect of climate. To clear up Mr Trump's misunderstanding, the average global temperature has increased by 0.85oC from 1880 - 2012. To further exemplify Mr Trump's shortcomings with scientific understanding (Fig.2), the USA is predicted to warm between 2oC– 6oC by the end of the 21st century.


Figure 2.  Left, showing changes in temperature and precipitation over North America from 1901 -2012 and right, showing forecast changes over North America in both Temperature and precipitation for the mid and late 21st century under differing emissions scenarios.

These changes should not to be taken in jest on social media, with huge implications for his own country, from which millions will suffer the consequences.

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