President Obama defended his assertion that climate change was the biggest threat to humanity, connecting global warming to growing radicalism around the world.
“Do you mean that it’s a greater threat than terrorism?” asked CBS reporter Norah O’Donnell after referring to his comments in an interview with the president aired this morning.
“What I mean by that is that we’re going to get ISIL, they’re going to be defeated,” Obama replied, arguing that rougue nations and terrorists would always try to disrupt peace around the world.
“There’s always some bad people out there doing bad things, and we have to be vigilant in going after them,” he said. Obama warned that when the oceans started rising as much as seven feet and weather patterns started destroying crops, it would create more chaos around the world.
“You’re seeing a kind of crisis that we can’t deal with though the deployment of Marines. We can’t deal with it through throwing money at it,” he said.
Obama urged critics to look at the history of the world to prove his point.
“What we know is that as human beings are placed under strain, then bad things happen,” he said. “Whenever people are desperate, when people start lacking food, when people are not able to make a living or take care of their families, that’s when ideologies arise that are dangerous.”
O’Donnell pointed out that Trump called Obama’s statement one of the dumbest statements he had ever heard in politics.
Obama chuckled in response.
“Mr. Trump should run back a tape or quote on some of the stuff he’s said,” he concluded.