Critics are taking Donald Trump to school after the former president made a bizarre claim about the impact of rising sea levels.
“You’ll have more seafront property, right, if that happens,” Trump told an audience in Michigan on Tuesday.
Michigan would not have more “seafront property” as it’s not on the sea, nor is it near the sea. In fact, the entire state is hundreds of feet above sea level.
However, climate change could lead to an increased risk of flooding, coastal erosion and other problems in the state, which borders four of the Great Lakes.
Trump may have been speaking more generally rather than specifically about Michigan, but the claim is still incorrect.
“If I have a little property on the ocean, I have a little bit more property, I have a little bit more ocean,” the former president said.
Trump does, in fact, have property near the ocean, including his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. But rising seas there would not give him “a little bit more property.”
Just the opposite: If the seas were to rise by 10 feet, he’d lose about half of his Mar-a-Lago property... and at 25 feet, there would be nothing left of it at all.
Climate scientist Michael E. Mann, a presidential distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has fact-checked Trump before, bluntly summed it up:
Others also fired back at Trump: