Accepting climate change is real and then doing nothing about it is Trump’s most damaging mistake yet

So, after all, Donald Trump doesn’t think climate change is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese as a deliberate ploy to undermine America’s industrial competitiveness. That, you might think, means he will now take the issue seriously. Don’t get your hopes up though.

Talking to CBS’s 60 Minutes programme this weekend, Trump said he remained unconvinced that the rise in global temperatures was a consequence of human activity. “Something’s changing…” he acknowledged, “…and it’ll change back again.” How, he did not explain. Indeed, as for doing anything to reverse the present warming trend, he made clear: “I don’t want to give trillions and trillions of dollars. I don’t want to lose millions and millions of jobs.”

All this comes a week after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that we have twelve years until we reach the tipping point at which a 1.5C rise in global temperatures leads to the kind of flooding that will devastate low-lying areas of the globe. This in turn will have an impact on everyone, as people are forced to migrate away from affected regions and seek refuge elsewhere.

In the context of impending doom, Trump’s modest shift in position is worse than useless. Indeed, to accept that rising temperatures are a thing, only to refuse to do anything about it, is arguably even grimmer than putting on a fur coat and proclaiming that global warming is a product of Chinese propaganda.

But then, it is something of a Donald Trump trope to hint at competence, only immediately to backtrack into incoherence.

After all, we have seen it recently too in relation to the handling of the Brett Kavanaugh appointment to the Supreme Court. Let’s remember that the president initially made relatively sensible comments about the testimony given by Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, to a senate committee, noting that she was a “credible” and “compelling” witness. Yet just a few days later he was mocking her at a rally for supporters in Mississippi, and appearing to suggest she was part of a political conspiracy.

We saw it too when Trump discussed the disappearance of Jamal Kashoggi during his CBS interview, when he admitted that “there’s a lot at stake”, adding notably that this was “maybe especially so because this man was a reporter”. This, for one of the very few times, appeared to be recognition of the particular role played by journalists in holding the powerful to account.

Yet you can bet your bottom dollar that within a few hours we’ll hear Trump calling out the “fake news media”, haranguing decent journalists in the US for their reporting of his own presidency. Indeed, only yesterday, shortly before the CBS show went to air, he was busy on Twitter, claiming that NBC News had “totally and purposefully changed the point and meaning of my story about General Robert E Lee…”, accusing the broadcaster of “as usual, dishonest reporting”.

On all of these matters, Trump’s attitude matters. It matters to freedom of the press; it matters to the wheels of justice, and to victims of abuse; and it matters to the future viability of our planet. Which is why those occasional glimmers of statesmanship are as bleak as they are brief.

According to Trump, even though global warming may be true, it nonetheless remains agenda-driven, presumably pursued by people who are both experts in their field and are genuinely concerned about what might happen to future generations, rather than limited egomaniacs who cannot see beyond the economic here and now.

The only climate which appears unchanging is that which Donald Trump has created in the White House and which has enraptured his supporters to the extent that a second presidential term feels eminently plausible, to say the least. And that will be enough to get the rest of the world boiling.