Trump says he doesn't believe in climate change because 'air and water is at a record clean'

Donald Trump has said he does not believe in manmade climate change because America’s water and air is “right now at a record clean”.

Asked why he was sceptical of a global warming report published by his own government, the US president gave a rambling response, much of it not backed by evidence, in which he blamed forest management, “small” oceans and China over the issue.

“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself - we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers,” Mr Trump told The Washington Post.

“You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including - just many other places - the air is incredibly dirty.

“And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over. I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from? And it takes many people to start off with.”

The US government climate report, made public last week, warned America faced devastating economic and health impacts from climate change by the end of the century.

It predicted the country’s economy would see economic losses in the hundreds of billions by 2100, and stated there was “no convincing alternative explanation” for climate change besides “human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases”.

Dismissing the report, Mr Trump continued: “Number two, if you go back and if you look at articles, they talked about global freezing, they talked about at some point the planets could have freeze to death (sic), then it’s going to die of heat exhaustion.

“There is movement in the atmosphere. There’s no question. As to whether or not it’s manmade and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it — not nearly like it is. Do we want clean water? Absolutely. Do we want clean air to breathe? Absolutely.”

Mr Trump next moved unprompted on to California’s forest fires, again falsely blaming a lack of “forest management” and suggesting raking the earth could solve the issue. The president said earlier this month Finland prevented forest fires by raking, a claim that left many Fins bemused.

“The fire in California, where I was, if you looked at the floor, the floor of the fire, they have trees that were fallen, they did no forest management, no forest maintenance, and you can light — you can take a match like this and light a tree trunk when that thing is laying there for more than 14 or 15 months,” Mr Trump said. “And it’s a massive problem in California.”

He continued: “You go to other places where they have denser trees — it’s more dense, where the trees are more flammable — they don’t have forest fires like this, because they maintain. And it was very interesting, I was watching the firemen, and they’re raking brush — you know the tumbleweed and brush, and all this stuff that’s growing underneath.

“It’s on fire, and they’re raking it, working so hard, and they’re raking all this stuff. If that was raked in the beginning, there’d be nothing to catch on fire.

“It’s very interesting to see. A lot of the trees, they took tremendous burn at the bottom, but they didn’t catch on fire. The bottom is all burned but they didn’t catch on fire because they sucked the water, they’re wet. You need forest management, and they don’t have it.”