May 17, 2018: "Witch Hunts" and Weather - The President Has No Clue

 

5/17/18: Donald Trump rises early and sets out to do what he does best. First, he turns on TV and watches Fox & Friends. Then he tweets and whines. At 6:28 a.m. he offers this nugget: “Congratulations America, we are now into the second year of the greatest Witch Hunt in American History.” 

Sadly, we learn later in the day that another witch has pled guilty. This time the pointy hat ends up on the head of Jeffrey Yohai, Paul Manafort’s former business partner and ex-husband of Manafort’s daughter. Yohai now joins five other witches who have pled guilty and agreed to cooperate. A seventh witch is cooperating but has not yet been charged.

 

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“I fully believe and know that the climate is changing. I also know that we human beings are contributing to it in a major way.” 

Jim Bridenstine, Trump choice to head up NASA

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TRUMP’S PICK to head up NASA admits what pretty much every scientist at NASA already knows. 

Former Oklahoma congressman and man-with-no-science background, Jim Bridenstine, tells staff in his first meeting: “I don’t deny the consensus that the climate is changing, in fact I fully believe and know that the climate is changing. I also know that we human beings are contributing to it in a major way.” 

That’s right, he said: “major way.”

“Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas,” Bridenstine informs gathered scientists, who have known this for decades. “We are putting it into the atmosphere in volumes that we haven’t seen and that greenhouse gas is warming the planet. That is absolutely happening and we are responsible for it.” 

If you watch too much right-wing news, you’ve never heard of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) and don’t know the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) exists. All are sounding dire warning. The WMO announced that records for 2016 show CO₂ in the atmosphere at its highest levels in 800,000 years. AMAP has been equally clear. If current trends continue Arctic sea ice may disappear within 20 years. NSIDC is blunt. An ominous trend involves loss of “old ice,” defined as ice five-years-old or older. In 1984 old ice covered 61% of the Arctic Ocean. Recent measurements say this cover has declined to 34%. Such ice ranges from 9.8 to 13.1 feet thick. 

 

Melting Greenland ice would pose a huge problem. 

Melting sea ice does not raise sea levels. Melting ice in Greenland does. Here again, trend lines are bleak. At Cape Morris Jessup, far to the north, hourly temperatures rarely surpass 32° Fahrenheit. It happened once in 1997. It happened five times in 2011, seven in 2017 and 59 times in 2018. 

Melting Greenland ice would pose a huge problem around the world; and it is starting to melt. According to another assortment of experts, ice in Greenland is melting at a rate not seen in centuries. You can read all about it in everyone’s favorite magazine, Geophysical Research Letters. 

Or you can watch Fox News and get dumber by the hour. 

In summary, we must once again label President Trump a “science moron.” This is a man, after all, who doesn’t believe in exercise because he thinks the body has a finite amount of energy. If you use some up there’s less left for golfing, tweeting, and signing hush money checks. Explaining science to Trump is like trying to explain the Virgin Birth to a Golden Retriever. 

In fact, let’s try a simple test to illustrate the point. Is the following Trump tweet about weather or climate: 

December 2013: Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee – I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax! 

Um…that would be weather.

 

January 2014: NBC News just called it the great freeze - coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX? 

Again: weather.

 

February 2014: Massive record setting snowstorm and freezing temperatures in U.S. Smart that GLOBAL WARMING hoaxsters changed name to CLIMATE CHANGE! $$$$ 

Stupid focus on terminology; still…weather.

 

July 2014: Record cold temperatures in July - 20 to 30 degrees colder than normal. What the hell happened to GLOBAL WARMING? 

That would be weather.

 

July 2015: It’s late in July and it is really cold outside in New York. Where the hell is GLOBAL WARMING??? We need some fast! It’s now CLIMATE CHANGE. 

Still stupid!

 

October 2015: 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. 

Can someone get this man a jacket? It’s still weather, you dolt.

 

December 28, 2017: In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up! 

Yes, weather.

 

Here’s climate change – or global warming – either one. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) agree that 2017 was the second or third hottest year, globally, on record. Using NOAA rankings for simplicity, the hottest years on record are:

See any trend???