Endangered arctic – starving polar bear / Andreas Weith / Wikemedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Global warming is making the polar ice caps melt, which hurts polar bears and other arctic creatures.

As usual, no one has said it better than President Trump:

Global warming, or “waming,” as President Trump referred to it, has been discussed for well over a century. But scientists have discussed a lot of theories they can’t prove, like evolution and heliocentrism, so there’s no reason we should believe them now.

It’s time to face the facts: global warming is simply not real. After all, there’s no evidence that the Earth’s temperature has even risen in the past few decades.

Oh, wait. Climate change is real. But the problem isn’t the rise in temperatures or the sixth mass extinction. The problem is how the U.S. government views these issues.

Former President Richard Nixon was a controversial man, but he did at least one good thing — in December 1970, Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose goal is to “protect human health and the environment.”

For years, the EPA strove to protect our environment, helping pass acts like the Endangered Species Act and the Oil Pollution Act. At the same time, U.S. presidents believed in the cause and the protection of our ecosystem.

As we now know, Trump isn’t like other presidents. But this difference might be the one that impacts us the most, 12 years into the future and beyond. According to Yale, 70 percent of Americans believe that climate change is happening.

Unfortunately, our president does not.

The problem with this is that climate change stems from factories, not families. As much as we think our recycling, composting, and short showers are helping, we’re not making that much of a difference. The real issue is in the worldwide industry. Minimizing factory emissions, deforestation, and extinction rates should be at the top of our priorities for the future.

The president seems confused by the language — he likes to call this issue “global warming” so that he can poke fun at science when the nation’s temperatures drop like they have this past week in the Midwest. But global warming is different from climate change, and it is actually happening at a steady rate. By 2030, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects that the Earth’s temperature will increase by 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial temperatures.

As much as people like to laugh at Trump, or praise him, it’s undeniable: the damage the president is doing by doing nothing will bite us all in the end. As the leader of the free world, he should know the difference between climate change and global warming, and he should be worried about both of them.

You can’t stop the world from suffering by ignoring the issues at hand. You can stop it through restrictive policies and conscious consumerism. The future is uncertain, but we need to make sure we have one.