August 6, 2018: Republicans Distrust "Fake News," Put Faith in the Climate Fool

 

8/6/18: Republicans hope to turn the midterms into a referendum on the economy. Their tax cuts are less popular than they hoped. In a Monmouth University poll only 34% of Americans approve, while 41% disapprove. Nearly a quarter of Americans “are not sure how they feel.” 

There’s more bad news. A Quinnipiac poll asks respondents if they feel proud to have Trump as president, embarrassed, or don’t know. Only 31% say they’re proud. That figure is inflated by the 69% of Republicans who don’t mind a pussy-grabbing president who locks up children along the border. 

Almost half of all Americans, 49%, choose “embarrassed.” That includes most white men with college degrees (54%) and most women (55%). More than half of Americans, ages 18-49, say they’re embarrassed. So are six in ten Hispanics and three of four African Americans.

 

Quinnipiac also posed this: 

15. Who do you trust more to tell you the truth about important issues: President Trump or the news media? 

No surprise: 77% of Republicans trust Trump more; 81% of Republicans still believe Congress is going to replace Obamacare with something better and 95% still think Mexico is going to pay for the wall. 

(Okay: those last two are jokes.) 

Pretty much the rest of American trusts the media more.

 

Finally, how do Americans feel about the free press and the First Amendment? Quinnipiac asks: 

16. Which comes closer to your point of view: the news media is the enemy of the people, or the news media is an important part of democracy? 

A plurality of Republicans muffs the question. By 42 to 35 percent they pick “enemy of the people.” 

No other group is close. Americans, generally, 65%, say the media is “part of democracy.”

 

* 

TRUMP DECIDES to tweet about the crisis in California, where horrific fires are burning out of control. Trump decides to help by attacking the Democratic governor: 

Governor Jerry Brown must allow the Free Flow of the vast amounts of water coming from the North and foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Can be used for fires, farming and everything else. Think of California with plenty of Water - Nice! Fast Federal govt. approvals.

 

 

Devoid of empathy. 

Sadly, as was true after Hurricane Maria pulverized Puerto Rico, the president shows he is devoid of empathy. 

He also gets into a muddle on facts. The Los Angeles Times runs a story carrying this headline: IN A STRIKINGLY IGNORANT TWEET, TRUMP GETS ALMOST EVERYTHING ABOUT CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES WRONG. 

A reporter explains: 

…The likeliest explanation for his take on water is that he’s confused by the demands for more irrigation water he’s hearing from Republican officeholders in the Central Valley. They’re the people who grouse about water being “wasted” by being diverted to the ocean, rather than into their fields.

 

Their demands have nothing to do with the availability of water for firefighting….

 

“The idea that there isn’t enough water is the craziest thing in the world [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted],” says Peter Gleick, president emeritus of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland. “There’s absolutely no shortage.”

 

What did Trump miss? Pretty much every essential point. People are dying. He doesn’t care. People have lost everything as homes and businesses burn to the ground. He doesn’t care. Climate change is causing increasing problems round the world. The president doesn’t understand. 

The Times is blunt: 

What [Trump] overlooked, plainly, is the increasing agreement among experts that intensifying climate change has contributed to the intensity of the wildfire season. California’s woodlands have been getting drier and hotter. As my colleagues Rong-Gong Lin II and Javier Panzar reported over the weekend, “California has been getting hotter for some time, but July was in a league of its own.”

 

How hot? This summer the surface temperature of ocean waters off San Diego was the hottest recorded in 102 years. Death Valley had the hottest month every recorded on the planet, with an average daily high of 108.1°. Statewide, the average nighttime low was 64.9°, the hottest for a month since 1895. 

In a second story the Times quotes all kinds of scientists. Or, as Trump and his fans might put it, they push “Fake News.” 

“In the past, it would just be kind of once in a while – the odd year where you would be really warm,” state climatologist Michael Anderson said.

 

But the last five years have been among the hottest in 124 years of record keeping, Anderson said.

 

“That’s definitely an indication that the world is warming, and things are starting to change,” said Anderson, who manages the California Department of Water Resources’ state climate program. “We’re starting to see things where it’s different. It’s setting the narrative of climate change.

 

On July 6, all-time temperature records were set at UCLA (111), Burbank and Santa Ana (114), and Van Nuys (117). Chino hit 120 degrees, the highest ever recorded at an automated surface observing system in the Ontario, Riverside or Chino areas.

 

It was the warmest July on record in Fresno; for 26 consecutive days that month, temperatures reached or exceeded 100 degrees – the longest continuous stretch on record, said Brian Ochs, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Hanford.

 

Of particular concern is how overnight temperatures continue to climb. The years with the top six warmest summertime minimum temperatures in California – defined as June through August – in descending order, are 2017, 2015, 2014, 2006, 2016 and 2013….

 

“We are seeing the impacts of climate change now,” said Nina Oakley, regional climatologist for the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno. “This is certainly it. It’s happening.”

 

The effects are felt far beyond the record books. When the mercury hit 113, Redding tied its temperature record for July 26 – the day the Carr fire raced out of control and began killing people.

 

It was one day among months of above-average temperatures that had dried out the brush to such a degree that it helped fuel the blaze’s ferocious spread.

 

Take a look at a map of the world’s temperatures years ago, and an old heat wave would be obvious to spot—just one spot on Earth that’s anomalously warm, said Neil Lareau, assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno. Now, “in pretty much the vast majority of the globe, it’s hotter than normal,” he said.

 

That’s the science. But we are stuck with a president who would rather tweet than study the topic in detail.