SACRAMENTO — Responding to news reports that President Donald Trump has decided to withdraw the United States from the historic Paris climate agreement, Gov. Jerry Brown said Wednesday that Trump is “on the wrong side of history” and that he hoped the president’s stance on global warming would be short-lived.

“President Trump, he’s going off the reservation hopefully for a month, a year, not much longer,” Brown said. “If he stays on his present course California will just redouble its efforts and the people of the world will have to rise up and take action. And I think in a very paradoxical way, that’s exactly what Trump is stimulating — the very opposite of climate denial is climate activism.”

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Editorial: Support Prop. 25, end California’s unfair cash-bail system Brown spoke to the Bay Area News Group in advance of a week-long visit to China to solidify climate and clean energy partnerships between California and Chinese provinces — ties Brown is trying to forge with other states and provinces in the U.S. and Canada. He leaves Friday.

The governor went on a similar mission to China in 2013, but a lot has changed since then. The Paris agreement was signed in 2015, and Trump was elected last fall.

Trump has claimed global warming was a hoax devised by the Chinese to gain unfair trade advantages. And on the campaign trail Trump promised to break from the 195-nation climate because it would hurt the U.S. economy. On Wednesday, he tweeted that he would announce his decision soon, followed by his campaign slogan, “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

I will be announcing my decision on the Paris Accord over the next few days. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2017

With Trump “going AWOL, China is emerging as the leader on climate change for the world,” Brown said. “We can’t wait. This is an existential threat. The ice is melting, the temperature is rising, the habitat is being destroyed. We have to make a turn, as humanity, if we want to survive.”

Brown said it was hard to predict exactly what the fallout would be if the United States, the world’s largest economy, pulled out of the climate accord. But the governor said he doubted that U.S. businesses would turn back to how they used to operate.

“The world is moving to zero-emission cars. They’re not moving to gas-guzzlers, much less to coal,” Brown said. “So Trump is on the wrong side of history. I don’t think Silicon Valley is going to follow him.”

Brown had a creative, if grim, answer to a question about his vision for California in 100 years, and whether the controversial, $64 billion bullet train he has championed would be built by then.

“Obviously, we’re going to have high-speed rail,” Brown said. “The real question is: Will anyone be around in 100 years? Martin Rees, the royal astronomer and chief scientist in Great Britain, said our chance of surviving the 21st century is about 50 percent at best, so we need to change — or your question will be moot.”