Don Lemon slams Trump administration’s ‘assault on the truth’ over climate report

CNN host Don Lemon late Tuesday slammed the response from President Trump and White House officials to his administration’s climate change report, saying they are waging an “assault on the truth” by not accepting its findings.
“Its strategy of just refusing to accept the facts when they don’t fit with the president’s worldview. Of refusing to accept what the members of his own administration tell him,” Lemon said.
Trump in an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday said that he doesn’t believe in man-made climate change.
“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,” Trump said. “You look at our air and our water and it’s right now at a record clean.”{mosads}
“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,” the president added.
The report published by his own administration, which was released on Friday, warns that climate change poses significant threats and says the current response efforts aren’t adequate.
In addition to Trump’s rejection of man-made climate change on Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said during a press briefing earlier in the day that the report was “not based on facts.”
“We think that this is the most extreme version and it’s not based on facts,” she said. “It’s not data driven. We’d like to see something that is more data driven. It’s based on modeling, which is extremely hard to do when you’re talking about the climate.”
Lemon also said Tuesday that Trump and the White House think they can “dismiss” the scientific consensus around climate change.
“This president and his White House, they think that they can just dismiss the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community that climate change is caused by human activity,” he said. “And their assault on the facts continues.”
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