Another day, another tirade of surreal and incorrect comments about science by Donald Trump. However, even by the President’s standards, his latest comments about climate change are an absolute doozy. 

The Washington Post recently sat down with Trump in the Oval Office for an interview on a wide range of subjects, including his administration's recent climate change report. A full transcript of the Post's interview can be found here. 

The report was conveniently released on the afternoon of Black Friday, which many saw as an attempt to sweep it under the rug while Americans were out hunting for discount televisions. Unfortunately, the plan didn’t work and it picked up a surprising amount of public attention. By Monday, Trump had dismissed the report, simply saying “I don’t believe it”. So, the Washington Post simply asked Trump what exactly he was skeptical about in the report.

“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself – we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers,” he replied.

“You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including – just many other places – the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over.”

He continued with this genuinely nonsensical remark:

“If you go back and if you look at articles, they talked about global freezing, they talked about at some point the planets could have freeze to death, then it’s going to die of heat exhaustion. There is movement in the atmosphere. There’s no question. As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it – not nearly like it is.”

As the conversation moved towards discussing the California wildfires, Trump then went back to a recent favorite point of his: Raking leaves. Trump previously lodged an odd theory that California’s wildfires could have been prevented by raking leaves.

This “theory” has since been totally discredited by a number of scientists, firefighters, and forestry experts. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop Trump commenting: “I was watching the firemen, and they’re raking brush... It’s on fire, and they’re raking it, working so hard, and they’re raking all this stuff. If that was raked in the beginning, there’d be nothing to catch on fire.”

“It’s very interesting to see,” he added.

Yes. Interesting.