September 23, 2019: Trump Proves Immovably Ignorant on Climate Change

 

9/23/19: Okay. False alarm. We do not have an environmentally aware President Trump. Rather, the only question seems to be, “How dumb is this man?” When it comes to climate change, he proves infallibly ignorant. 

Again.

 

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Trump says he wants clean air and clean water.

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At the U.N. General Assembly today, he sat in for fifteen minutes as world leaders discussed the threat. The topic just didn’t hold his attention. As he exited the session, reporters managed to stop him briefly and ask why he bothered to stop in at the Climate Summit at all. 

First, the basics. The Climate Summit was discussing global climate and how that climate is changing. Also: what should be done by the nations of the world to address rising global temperatures. 

Got it? Climate. We already know that the president is unable to differentiate between weather and climate. It’s as if he can’t tell the difference between a tuna fish sandwich and a tuna.

 

In fact, a U.N. report released this week notes that the period ending on the last day of 2019 is on pace to be the hottest five-year span in recorded history. Trump and his merry MAGA band will hear the initials “U.N.” and snap their minds shut like wolf traps. So we should probably try NASA, instead, which warns that, globally, eighteen of the hottest nineteen years are the last eighteen (2001-2018). And 2019 is on pace to be the nineteenth out of twenty. 

So how did the Climate-Denier-in-Chief respond? 

“I’m a big believer,” he told reporters, “in clean air and clean water, and all countries should get together and do that, and they should do it for themselves. That’s very, very important.” 

Again, the president proves he is immovably ignorant. 

Yes, sir, clean water is nice. Yes, Mr. President, clean air.Great. The cleanliness of water and air have nothing to do with climate change. You might just as sensibly have said, “I like banging porn stars.”

 

If the air is hotter, we have a serious problem, no matter how clean it is. If the air is hotter, water will evaporate more quickly. It won’t matter if the water is clean. More water will remain suspended in hotter air. Hotter water will give greater power to hurricanes. When hurricanes come, the clean water will be dumped out of the clean air in torrents and cities will drown. See: Hurricane Imelda (2019), Hurricane Florence (2018) and Hurricane Harvey (2017), all of which dumped record rainfall.

 

 

 

Finally, President Trump decided to wrap it up by mocking an autistic teenager, Greta Thunberg. 

Thunberg is a 16-year-old climate activist and on Monday issued an impassioned call for action at the U.N. It was the time to fight climate change, she said, past time for hollow words from world leaders – “thoughts and prayers,” as it were, for Planet Earth. Trump could have been a mature 73-year-old leader of a world power and just let it go. 

But he had to be an asshole:

 

 

Thunberg has a different way of speaking. That’s true. But her message resonates with her generation, which will reap the winds Trump and his geriatric fan base are now happy to sow. 

And don’t forget. The President of the United States just wasted his time picking on a Swedish teenager!