September 12, 2020: Climate Change Writ Large

 

9/12/20: It’s a brutal weekend for people in California, Oregon, and Washington. Massive fires ravage those states. People living in Portland, Oregon are advised to be ready to evacuate. Flames threaten the city of 650,000 from the south.

 

Dozens of people in California are missing as fast moving blazes sweep over homes and towns. Fire season is far from over across the American West – and five million acres have already been turned to ash.

 

Climate change writ large.

 

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“He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges.”

 

The editors of Scientific American, calling on voters to reject President Trump

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Yet, behind the scenes, Team Trump has added another hack to its lineup of All-Star prevaricators. David Legates is a geography professor at the University of Delaware. That sounds promising. Unfortunately, as Science magazine reports, he “has a long history of questioning fundamental climate science and has suggested that an outcome of burning fossil fuels would be a more habitable planet for humans [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted].”

 

Legates will serve as deputy assistant of commerce for observation and prediction at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

 

Science doesn’t pull any punches:

 

Legates has spent his career denying consensus climate science while elevating the work of fringe researchers and industry-funded scientists. He has claimed that addressing climate change would do more harm than good, and he has said pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would benefit humanity.

 

When testifying before the House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee last year, Legates blamed natural variations for the unprecedented level of warming that scientists say is caused by the release of carbon dioxide from human activity.

“Climate has always changed, and weather is always variable, due to complex, powerful natural forces,” Legates said. “No efforts to stabilize the climate can possibly be successful.”

 

Legates has also said that teaching children about climate change was an effort “to satisfy the climate change fearmongering agenda that pervades our society today.”

 

Other highlights of his career include co-authoring a paper that questioned findings about the role of climate change in destroying polar bear habitat. This fine work was funded in part by grants from the American Petroleum Institute and Koch Industries, InsideClimate News reports. 

You can tell who Legates is by listening to his defenders. One is Myron Ebell, a climate denier himself, the man who headed up President Trump’s E.P.A. transition team. That would be the team that saddled us with the much-investigated Scott Pruitt as administrator of the E.P.A. 

According to Ebell, Legates will bring real science to his job. “This is the kind of thing we have been pushing for since before Trump was elected,” Ebell claimed, “to get real science into the assessment, instead of junk science, which NASA and NOAA have been doing for years.” 

Yeah. F**k those scientists at NASA. We’ve got a geography professor – and Big Oil and Gas on our side.

 

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TO SHOW YOU just how impressed real scientists are when it comes to picks like Legate, the magazine Scientific American has issued its first ever presidential endorsement in 175 years.

 

Breaking with tradition dating back to Zachary Taylor, editors say they are “compelled” to support Joe Biden.

 

The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people – because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges.

 

That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to protect our health, our economy and the environment…[He will] set the country back on course for a safer, more prosperous and more equitable future.

 

(See also:  9/14/20.)