Within the first 8 hours of the inauguration of President Trump, the official White House website deleted nearly all mentions of climate change. Although, there is one exception: Trump vows to eliminate the Obama administration’s climate change policies, which previously had a prominent and detailed web page on whitehouse.gov. The action was not unexpected. It was part of a full digital turnover of whitehouse.gov, which included removal of all the Obama administration’s personal and policy pages. Additionally, the official White House Twitter handles changed over, allowing Trump to now post on Twitter as @POTUS.

What does a Trump administration mean for climate change? During the election process, Trump made very strong comments about climate change only to lead us believing that he is a climate change skeptic. Not only did he make comments on the campaign trail, but he has made comments in the past.

On November 6, 2012 Trump tweeted “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Then on October 19, 2015 he tweeted “it’s really cold outside, they are calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming!”

In July of 2015, the Department of Defense released a report on security implications of climate change. In short, the report stated that “global climate change will aggravate problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership and weak political institutions that threaten stability in a number of countries.”

In December, Trump conducted an interview on “Fox’s News Sunday” with host Chris Wallace. During the interview, Trump said “I’m still open minded. Nobody really knows. Look, I’m somebody that gets it, and nobody really knows. It’s not something that’s hard and fast. I do know this: Other countries are eating our lunch.”

What makes this a concerning issue is that Trump disagrees with the broad scientific consensus that human activity, which includes the burning of fossil fuels for transportation, heating, and industrial manufacturing, is the cause of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that it is “extremely likely” that, since the 1950s, humans and their greenhouse gas emissions have been the “dominant cause” of the planet’s warming trend. The top 10 hottest years on record have all been since 1998, and 2016 continued that trend being the hottest year ever.

“Personally, I agree and disagree with climate change theories,” said senior Eli Rafail. “The thought that climate change is going to cause the end of the world is a little much for me, but I can see the weather changing,” explained Rafail. “For example, Christmas day the temperature was close to 50 degrees with no snow.”

The opinions of climate change are very different from people to people. Some people believe that climate change is a hoax, some are right in the middle about the issue, and others have very strong opinions about the matter.

“Climate change is a huge issue in the world today,” explained Alex Flenniken. “I mean look around us, the weather is getting worse in some places, floods are more common, and hurricanes are becoming even more dangerous,” explained Flenniken. “Look at the state of California. They are going through a long drought that is causing many issues such as floods when it rains slightly,” said Flenniken. “The world’s weather and climate are changing because of human activity so I think that we, as humans, need to fix what we caused so that we can leave a much cleaner planet for the generations to come.”

During the election, Trump brought up the issue of leaving the Paris Climate Agreement. But is it really that easy to leave? It’s possible, but tricky, and it could undermine global cooperation on other issues. On January 31, 2017, a former Trump aide said that the U.S. will pull out of Paris Climate Agreement within “days.” In the coming years of the Trump administration, it will be interesting to see what happens to plans to fix the climate and planet.