Trump pushes nonsense theories about climate and nuclear weapons during bizarre interviews

While analysts debate whether his opponent is pivoting to the center after being elevated to the position of Democratic nominee, Donald Trump is showing no signs of doing so.

Instead, he’s falling back on an old favorite: wild tales supposed to illustrate the folly of liberalism around the issue of climate change and environmentalism. The ex-president did so in two interviews this week, one with a conservative podcaster and another as he delivered a rally-esque diatribe to a one-man audience of Dr Phil on Tuesday.

First came was his explanation for why temperatures are warming and the Earth’s climate is now observably headed in one direction: nuclear weapons.

“The problem isn’t the fact that the oceans, in 500 years, are going to raise a quarter of an inch. The problem is nuclear weapons, it’s nuclear warming,” the ex-president told podcaster Shawn Ryan on Monday. “The level of power of the nuclear weapon today...You take a look, go back many many decades, and look at Hiroshima, Nagasaki — that was so many years ago. And now you look at today, and multiply that by what took place there by 300 or 400 times. And that's the problem.”

Nuclear weapons are not used in conflict today; many nations still possess them, but largely as a deterrent. Even US officials in the Biden administration, who have frequently been on the hawkish side of warnings about Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere, say that the Kremlin’s threats of the potential use of such weaponry to be just bluster.

Most nuclear testing ended decades ago. The exception is in North Korea, which continues to develop a nuclear weapons program and most recently tested the detonation of a nuclear device in 2017, doing so in an underground facility like