April 17-22, 2017: Trump Gets Climate Science Wrong - but White Supremacists Love Him

 

4/17/17: The lawyer for white supremacist Matthew Heimbach, charged with assaulting an African American woman at a Trump rally in March 2016, offers up a noteworthy new kind of defense. 

He blames the president. 

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My client, “acted pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President.” 

Attorney for Matthew Heimbach

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Really, no joke! His lawyer insists Heimbach can’t be faulted. His client “acted pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President.” If found liable for damages, he says, “any liability must be shifted to one or both of them.” (See: 8/8/19.)

 

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TRUMP ADVISERS spend the day arguing over whether or not to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. New E.P.A. head and noted climate-change denier Scott Pruitt and Steve Bannon insist the president keep his campaign promise and exit. Secretary of State Tillerson and co-directors of the Bureau of Nepotism, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, warn that withdrawal will erode faith in the U.S., particularly where American allies in Europe are concerned. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: A 2014 poll found the United States had more climate deniers than any other advanced nation. This may prove that money invested in pseudo-scientific work by Big Oil and Big Coal pays Big Dividends. 

Of course, you could read all about climate change in that font of “fake news,” Scientific American magazine. You could go to NASA’s website. You could do your research. But act quickly before the Trump administration slashes funding for climate change research and scrubs the NASA site. The future looks grim unless you have your head so far up your posterior you can’t catch a glimpse of anything past your small intestine. You can also check out a letter signed by 375 scientists, including 35 Nobel Prize winners, stating emphatically that human activity is driving climate change. 

Meanwhile, Trump supporters can simply stick their heads in their freezers and pretend 2016 wasn’t the hottest year on record, beating out 2015 for the old record, which beat out 2014 for the record before that.

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4/18/17: The powerful armada Trump claims he sent steaming toward North Korea (see: 4/12/17) turns out to be steaming through the Sunda Strait, going the other way. We do have a great military, but it’s not going to be easy hitting North Korea from 3,000 miles away. 

(This is not the last time the president will prove he’s a complete numbskull, regarding the U.S. military.) 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (7/4/19): One of Trump’s greatest moments – his claim that in 1781, George Washington captured the airports at Yorktown. 

Almost impossibly ignorant.

Okay, not even close!

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4/19/17: The Hill reports: “A Moscow-based think tank linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin created a plan to swing the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.” 

Damn reporters! Always digging for facts and writing stories based thereon.

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4/20/17: Attorney General Jeff Sessions tells a conservative commentator he’s “amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific” could block Trump’s second travel ban.  

Sessions apparently forgets all federal judges have such power and that Hawaii is part of the United States.

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4/21/17: Six hundred icebergs have already been seen in waters near Newfoundland. Most years the number at this point is 60. This is more evidence that the Greenland ice sheet is breaking up. 

We need more snowballs! (See: 3/14/17.)

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4/22/17: Thousands of scientists, supporters, and environmentalists demonstrate across the nation. Organizers are motivated by Mr. Trump’s attacks on funding for NASA, his decision to turn the E.P.A. over to a man who could not, in confirmation hearings, name a single E.P.A. regulation he supported, and in the face of the president’s claims that global warming is a hoax and vaccines might be killing children.

Bring back measles and smallpox! (See: 4/29/19.) 

Dr. Naomi Oreskes, a professor at Harvard, who participates in the march, explains: “I can’t think of a time where scientists felt the enterprise of science was being threatened [emphasis added] in the way scientists feel now.” 

The president’s grasp of scientific truths has often proved tenuous. See, for example, his idiotic comments on hairspray.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: On the eve of the summit with North Korea, fourteen months later, The New York Times will report that the White House “has never added a science adviser or senior counselor trained in nuclear physics.” The State Department will still not have a chief scientist. Nor will the Department of Agriculture, although Trump did nominate Sam Clovis for that post, despite the inconvenient fact that Clovis had zero background in…science. The Interior Department and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will both have disbanded climate change panels. Joel Clement, an expert in climate change at Interior, will be reassigned to a new job. That new job: overseeing fees from fossil fuel drilling.)