Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has expressed strong skepticism about anthropogenic climate change, suggesting human influence is a “minor effect”, and that there are other priorities which deserve more attention.

HIATT: Last one: You think climate change is a real thing? Is there human-caused climate change? TRUMP: I think there’s a change in weather. I am not a great believer in man-made climate change. I’m not a great believer. There is certainly a change in weather that goes – if you look, they had global cooling in the 1920s and now they have global warming, although now they don’t know if they have global warming. They call it all sorts of different things; now they’re using “extreme weather” I guess more than any other phrase. I am not – I know it hurts me with this room, and I know it’s probably a killer with this room – but I am not a believer. Perhaps there’s a minor effect, but I’m not a big believer in man-made climate change. STROMBERG: Don’t good businessmen hedge against risks, not ignore them? TRUMP: Well I just think we have much bigger risks. I mean I think we have militarily tremendous risks. I think we’re in tremendous peril. I think our biggest form of climate change we should worry about is nuclear weapons. The biggest risk to the world, to me – I know President Obama thought it was climate change – to me the biggest risk is nuclear weapons. That’s – that is climate change. That is a disaster, and we don’t even know where the nuclear weapons are right now. We don’t know who has them. We don’t know who’s trying to get them. The biggest risk for this world and this country is nuclear weapons, the power of nuclear weapons.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/03/21/a-transcript-of-donald-trumps-meeting-with-the-washington-post-editorial-board/

The other leading Republican Presidential Candidate, Senator Ted Cruz, has also expressed strong skepticism about anthropogenic climate change, and has made genuine efforts to hold climate scientists to account for their alarmist statements.

Nuclear weapons, particularly terrorist nukes, are, or should be, a growing concern. As WUWT detailed in a previous post, once a substantial amount of fissile material is in circulation, the threat it poses may hang over all of our heads for hundreds of years. Refining fissile material is incredibly difficult, but once produced, weapons grade fissiles are horribly easy to smuggle across international borders. When the material arrives at its intended target, assembling the fissile material into a nuclear bomb is something which could be performed in a normal suburban basement. Several rogue states with dubious links to terrorist organisations, appear to be doing everything in their power to produce fissile material which falls into this dangerous category.

Republican voters are in a fortunate position. While the leading presidential candidates are both strongly skeptical of the alleged dangers of anthropogenic climate change, Republicans had a real choice on this issue. There were other Republican candidates on offer, who expressed very different views about climate change – they had their opportunity to make their case.

Democrats have not been presented with a comparable set of options. Despite strong evidence that many Democrats are growing tired of their leadership putting climate corporate welfare ahead of jobs and the economy, as far as I can tell, the Democrat presidential candidate positions on climate change appear to be uniformly alarmist.

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