One of the main talking points from the 90-minute live televised debate on 26 September, between US presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton, was the Republican candidate denying that he said that climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese.

During a discussion on how to boost the US economy, Clinton told the crowd how said her opponent "thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese," to which replied "I did not." The comment was pounced on by Clinton's social media team, and many others on Twitter, who pointed out that this was exactly what Trump had said in November 2012... in a message retweeted more than 87,000 times.

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There was even a rumour that Trump's team deleted the tweet during the debate after a doctored image purportedly showing the tweet was "no longer available" spread across the social network.

However, the tweet is still online and attention is being drawn to it now more than ever. It looks unlikely it will ever get deleted by Trump or his team for fear of spreading the potential Streisand Effect.

In fact, as pointed out by Reddit user Hatewrecked, there are still more than 40 tweets publicly available online in which the presidential hopeful was sceptical or flat-out denied the existence of climate change and global warming – with the two seemingly interchangeable in Trump's mind – or that they are a hoax.

On top of these tweets, Trump also called climate change a "hoax" in a January 2014 edition of Fox & Friends and told CNN's New Day, "I don't believe in climate change" almost exactly one year ago.

Just a week ago, in a speech to the United Nations on Tuesday 20 September, outgoing US President Barack Obama said if the world does not act against climate change, the effects would include "cities submerged and nations displaced, and food supplies decimated, and conflicts born of despair."

Donald Trump