It was all about the escalator. On 23 September Trump went to speak at the United Nations General Assembly and the escalator malfunctioned. He wrote on Truth Social: “This was absolute sabotage… The people that did it should be arrested.” A UN spokesperson said the escalator stopped when a Trump videographer accidently triggered the safety mechanism.
To add to Trump’s frustration of having to actually walk up a flight of stairs (he’s 79 years old and obese), the teleprompter in the auditorium didn’t work. Trump said half-jokingly: “Whoever is operating this teleprompter is in big trouble.” It turns out that White House staff operated the teleprompter.
A Fox bloviator, Jesse Watters, full of righteous indignation, called Trump’s mishaps “insurrection”, adding, “And what we ought to do is leave the UN or bomb it”. Bomb the UN right there on the east side of Manhattan (population 1.6 million and 2.2km from the TV studio where Jesse Watters broadcasts).
‘Climate change is a con job’ – says con man
The ‘leader of the free world’ addressed the assembled dignitaries by stating: “Your countries are going to hell.” He then spent 56 minutes doing what he does best – whining and spewing invective, interspersed with gibberish and misstatements. One of his lies jumped out at me: “Climate change – it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
In 2009 Trump supported legislation to combat climate change. By 2012 he had done a 180, and in 2016 was announcing on the campaign trail that climate change was a non-issue “created by and for the Chinese”.
As one of Trump’s first presidential acts in 2017, he pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement. He also scrapped the EPA clean power plan, loosened regulations on toxic air pollution, weakened auto fuel economy rules and revoked standards for sea level rise. In December 2017, during a cold snap, he tweeted: “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old global warming right now.”
‘Global warming’ (often now referred to as global heating) became a topic of urgent discussion in 1988 when NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the US Senate:
“The Earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. There is only a 1 percent chance of an accidental warming of this magnitude … The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now … In any given month, there is almost as much area that is cooler than normal as there is area warmer than normal. A few decades in the future, it will be warmer almost everywhere.”
Hansen’s testimony freaked out the fossil fuel industry. They ran the numbers. Hansen was right. The greenhouse effect is caused mainly by carbon emissions, 75% of which come from fossil fuels. They all agreed that they did not want the general public getting upset and hurting their bottom line. Republican spin doctor Frank Luntz advised President Bush:
“It’s time for us to start talking about ‘climate change’ instead of global warming … ‘Climate change’ is less frightening than ‘global warming’… While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.”
The snows they used to have on Kilimanjaro
In 1936 Ernest Hemingway wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Back in the 1970s I could look out the window on a clear morning and see plenty of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro. Not anymore. Over the last century the mountain has lost 80% of its snow, most of it since 1970.
In those good old days, Tanzania had regular rainy seasons. Where I lived, the long rains came in mid-March and ended in late May. The short rains ran October to December. We almost never had rain in August. Not anymore. We may have showers in August and only drizzle in April. Predictable rainy seasons are sooo 40 years ago.
The hard science of global heating
Global warming may sound more frightening than climate change, but it is most definitely happening. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) measured global temperature change against a 1901–2000 average. They found that 1970 was 0.05C above that benchmark, following a trend where temperatures were a little above, or a little below the long-term average.
By 2024, things had changed radically. The temperature last year was a whopping 1.28C above the average. That made 2024 the hottest year on record, hotter than the previous hottest year … 2023. In fact, the ten hottest years out of the last 175 occurred between 2015 and 2024. We’re now at 1.5C above the pre-industrial level. The NOAA projects that the rise in global temperature by 2100 will be anywhere from 2.6C at the low end to 8.5C at the high end.
The consequences of (very real) global heating
Think about it. Coconut trees in Alaska and Greenland. Distillers in Scotland switching from whiskey to rum. Camels in Siberia. January skiing in Norway and Switzerland – water skiing, that is.
According to Yale Environment 360: “The world has lost an estimated 28 trillion metric tonnes of ice since the mid-1990s.” It’s now up to 1.2 billion tonnes a year and escalating.
All that melted ice contributes to rising sea levels. Estimates put that rise at 20–30cm by 2050. If that proves to be right, the Maldives will disappear, as well as the Solomon Islands, Fiji, the Marshall Islands and several others. Monrovia Liberia is already sinking into the sea.
By 2100 the sea-level rise could be as much as 1.8 metres. If that happens, Dar es Salaam, where I live, will become part of the Indian Ocean. Other cities that might go underwater include New York, Boston, Miami, Long Beach, San Francisco, Vancouver, Tokyo, Bangkok, Shanghai, Ho Chi Minh City, Dhaka, Venice, Amsterdam, Dublin and London. New Orleans is already below sea level.
The UN forecasts anywhere from 25 million to one billion “environmental migrants” by 2050. Want to guess where they will try to migrate to?
Donald Trump says climate change is a con job, something he knows all about. His secretary of energy, Chris Wright, agrees. That’s probably why Trump selected him. In a BBC interview, Wright endorsed his department’s July report that stated the threat of climate change has been exaggerated, that sea level rise is not accelerating, and that computer models of the climate inflate future temperature rises. He also dismissed government subsidies for wind and solar power: “You’ve got to be able to walk on your own after 25 to 30 years of subsidies.”
The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act gave tax credits to clean energy investments of $42bn annually over 10 years, which Trump’s 2025 Big Beautiful Bill will significantly scale back. By comparison the fossil fuel industry – big oil and coal – gets benefits estimated at $760bn a year, according to FracTracker Alliance.
The global heating escalator isn’t stopping
Environmental journalist Bill McKibben has said repeatedly that climate change is not about politics, not about liberals and conservatives, not about environmentalists and industrialists – it’s about humans and science: “… and you can’t negotiate with physics and chemistry, you can’t compromise with them or spin them away.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates the “tipping point” when global warming becomes irreversible will occur sometime between 2026 and 2042. Repeat 2026 … three months from now.
Unlike Donald Trump, Mother Nature has been going up the global warming escalator for the last half century and the world has not triggered the safety mechanism. It seems less and less likely every day that she will be coming down.
