Piers Morgan’s 45-minute-long interview with Donald Trump, which aired Sunday, opened with a flashback. It was 2008: the year Morgan won Celebrity Apprentice. “I don’t know if you can remember what you said, but you said this,” recalled Morgan, as the two spoke on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week. “You said, ‘Piers, you’re a vicious guy . . . You’re tough, you’re smart, you’re probably brilliant . . . You’re certainly not diplomatic, but you did an amazing job, and you beat the hell out of everybody, and you won by far more than anybody’ . . . Watching your campaign, it looked like you’d stolen my playbook, Mr. President.” Both egos simultaneously buoyed, the pair began to rifle through Trump’s (Morgan-inspired) playbook. They discussed Brexit (the president would have negotiated it differently); women (although Trump is not a feminist, women and families want to see strength at the border); and his looming state visit to the U.K. (Trump pretended to be unfamiliar with London Mayor Sadiq Khan).

Climate change was also on the agenda, and Trump addressed the topic with the lofty manner of a romantic poet, pairing his apparent love for nature with a stubborn resistance to rationalism. “I’ll tell you what I believe in. I believe in clear air. I believe in crystal-clear, beautiful water. I believe in just having good cleanliness in all,” he said. The Paris climate accord, however, would have led to “lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production,” Trump insisted, defending his decision to withdraw the United States from the historic international agreement. He told Morgan that he could revisit the deal, but only if it were “completely different” and offered on better terms.

Whatever terms Trump might have in mind, of course, are secondary to the fact that the president doesn’t appear to believe in climate change at all. “There is a cooling and there is a heating, and I mean, look—it used to not be climate change. It used to be global warming. Right? . . . That wasn’t working too well, because it was getting too cold all over the place. The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records, so O.K., they’re at a record level.”

The president has long expressed skepticism about global warming, climate change, and, more specifically, the melting of ice caps. “East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record,” he tweeted during record snowfalls in December. “Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!” In 2014, he wrote: “POLAR ICE CAPS are at an all time high, the POLAR BEAR population has never been stronger. Where the hell is global warming.” Two years earlier, he suggested that climate change was a hoax “created by and for the Chinese” to make the U.S. uncompetitive.

The overwhelming majority of scientists disagree. Data released this month by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that 2017 was one of the hottest years on record. (The world’s oceans have never been hotter.) It’s also unclear what Trump’s comments about the ice caps referred to. The N.O.A.A.’s annual Arctic Report Card, published in December, found that the percentage of the Arctic Ocean that freezes over during the winter hit a record low in 2017, and is declining faster than at any time in the past 1,500 years. NASA reported last year that sea ice at the South Pole also hit a record low due to melting.

Trump’s dismissal of climate-change science extends beyond his social-media output (often administered, he confirmed to Morgan, from bed). Scott Pruitt, the fossil-fuel industry champion who now leads the Environmental Protection Agency, has said that “true environmentalism” is “using natural resources that God has blessed us with to feed the world,” and has set about rolling back Obama-era environmental regulations designed to limit carbon emissions. Pruitt’s E.P.A. has begun to repeal the previous administration’s Clean Power Plan, and is reviewing new rules that would allow more pollution in the country’s rivers, streams, and other bodies of water. The term “climate change,” meanwhile, has all but disappeared from the E.P.A.’s Web site. The page that was once dedicated to climate change has been replaced with a simple, terrifying message: “We are currently updating our website to reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt.”