August 10, 2018: California Ablaze - It's Climate Change, Stupid

 

8/10/18: The Mendocino fire, largest in California history, is burning out of control. More than 305,000 acres have been reduced to ash. The ninth largest fire and the twenty-eighth largest are also active and only partially contained. 

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“It’s not a wakeup call anymore.” 

Cynthia Rosenzweig, NASA scientist

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Combined, the three fires have charred 905 square miles. By comparison, the total land area of Rhode Island is 1,045 square miles. 

As the Los Angeles Times reports, “The fires in July and August have been fueled by record-setting heat [emphasis added here and below], which has left brush bone dry and highly flammable.” 

At least 40 lives have been lost.

Dropping fire retardant on a California inferno.

 

Yet, at the pinnacle of the Trump administration you have a science moron in the Oval Office. Technically, one devastating fire season does not prove climate change is real. One terrible year followed on the heels of another (2017) provides a more compelling warning. In fact, the thirty largest fires in California history have all ignited in a hotter, drier landscape since 2002. 

You can label climate change “a hoax” as our idiot president does. You can listen to the vested interests that push policies friendly to Big Oil and Big Coal, who claim the science is fuzzy. You can’t deny facts: 2018 is on pace to be the fourth hottest year, globally, ever recorded. The four hottest years will be the last four. Seventeen of the hottest eighteen have occurred since 2001. 

You can pretend that climate change isn’t happening, but you have a huge pile of evidence you have to ignore. 

“It’s not a wake-up call anymore,” Cynthia Rosenzweig, who heads the climate impacts group at NASA’s Goddard Institute, said of global warming and its toll. “It’s now absolutely happening to millions of people around the world.” 

Kim Cobb, a professor of earth and atmospheric science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, offered grim warning. “What we’re seeing today is making me, frankly, calibrate not only what my children will be living but what I will be living, what I am currently living.”

 

Trump and his climate-denier advisers only bury their heads deeper in the golf course turf. The interests of Big Oil and Big Coal get unfettered play. We gain a few jobs in the coal industry. That’s good for the miners, and all sympathy to those who still struggle to find work. 

Unfortunately, hundreds of millions of Americans, born and unborn, and billions round the globe, are going to pay a price for inaction today.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: The year 2019 will eventually set records as the hottest ever, and Australia will be devastated by wildfires. 

In 2020, California will be swept by even worse fires than in 2018. 

The trend lines are clear; and during his entire presidency, Trump either doesn’t see them – because he’s too lazy to study the subject – or does see them and doesn’t care. Historians will mark his failure in flaming letters.

September 14: Trump - a Walking, Talking Environmental Disaster

 

9/14/20: President Trump headed for California on Monday to raise money for his campaign. With the state in crisis, he stopped to talk to California leaders in one of his most useless meetings ever.

 

There to offer solace for a state on fire, he smirked.

 

Challenged by a fire official to face up to the fact that climate change had made the situation more dire, and that the science was clear, the president responded, “It will start getting cooler. Just watch.” 

“I don’t think science knows, actually,” he added.

 

Trump had previously blamed the wildfires on poor forest management by Democrats who run the state. At one point he told his underlings that he wasn’t going to give the people whose homes had burned down federal disaster aid, because they hadn’t voted for him. Now Gov. Gavin Newsom pointed out that 57% of the land in his state was federally-owned forest. 

So, you might say: Trump had the burden on his shoulders, and it would be nice if he did his part. 

 

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a ballot…” 

If you don’t follow environmental issues closely, you may not realize how terrible Donald J. Denier has been in regard to climate change, or even protecting clean air and water. In another clear sign of the growing danger – not counting the fact a good chunk of the United States is in flames – and more named hurricanes have formed already this year than in any  year since record keeping began in 1851 – 170 environmental organizations have united to warn their members. Do not to vote for the Green Party in November. Do not sit out the election and pout, just because Joe Biden’s policies might not go as far as you want. Fifty years of advocacy for cleaner air and water, and the health of the planet, have taught these organizations hard truths.

 

The bitter lesson of 2016 cannot be repeated – when enough “green” votes in several key states went to a third party candidate and allowed Trump to clinch his wide-bottom seat in the Oval Office.

 

Leaders of the group write in a joint letter:

 

Elections matter most in the end. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a ballot is a good guy with a ballot, and this year, our ballots will be cast for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

 

Many of us have voted for third-party candidates in other elections, convinced that a party called “Green” was the only principled choice. Not this year. This year the only meaningful green votes will be cast for the single candidate who can end Trump’s disastrous presidency [emphasis added]. Only by rallying behind the Democratic Party can we end the Trump administration’s unprecedented malignancy, fear mongering, pathological lying, and atrocious policy making. This is not the year to…waste a single vote.

 

They present two starkly different options:

 

Sure, [Biden] isn’t perfect. Which of us is? But in the 2020 election, the most crucial since 1864, we have only two meaningful options: we can make a lifetime humanitarian our president, backed by a able cabinet and a progressive Congress; or expand the strongman rule of Donald Trump, who desecrates his office every day, spreads racism and a fatal virus for political gain, ignores environmental justice, embraces the fossil fuel industry, and calls the climate crisis a hoax.

 

Every generation is accountable for its leaders, and we are accountable for Trump. We can beat him and his congressional enablers at the polls or help him stay in power by wasting our votes or staying home, and tell children not yet born we were too pure to vote for Democrats.

 

All we have to lose are our country and the planet.

 

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QUOTING Joe Biden, who recently labeled Trump a “climate arsonist,” would be too easy. Biden was right, but it may sway a few people if we pay attention to warnings within the Republican Party. Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, is backing Biden, in large part because of the president’s retrograde environmental policies. 

“It’s mind-boggling, the ignorance that he displays on this subject,” Ms. Whitman said in an interview this week. “He doesn’t understand climate change. He doesn’t particularly believe in science. It’s all about him and his re-election.” 

“He doesn’t govern for all Americans.” 

Worse, he doesn’t govern for future generations. If he wins a second term, that’s as far as his thinking extends. 

You can see many of the massive western fires from outer space.

Bootleg Fire in Oregon, seen from space.

 

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“Everything about it, was fucking appalling.”

 

In other news, Tim Miller, former spokesman for the Republican National Committee, lets rip after watching Trump conduct a campaign rally in Henderson, Nevada. Bad enough, in these days of mass coronavirus spread, that he joked about his followers crowding together and howling in anger. “The spittle was flying,” Miller said. “So were the lies.” He called the whole affair “a public-health monstrosity.” He went on to describe the president’s appearance as “a shocking and unimaginably wheels-off undertaking given that it came amid a pandemic that is still killing a thousand Americans a day and with wildfires making much of the West Coast uninhabitable.”

 

Miller went on to list the various lies of President Trump – including at least one new one, that when he took over grass was growing on the “runways” used by NASA. But let’s just sum it all up.

 

“Everything about it,” Mr. Miller said of the rally, “was fucking appalling.”

 

In fact it was so appalling that it would stand out as the single most appalling and reckless political event hosted by any presidential nominee in my lifetime before yesterday by a long shot, if you just didn’t count anything else that Donald Trump did.

 

And that’s the problem. Somewhere along the way he removed many people’s ability to be appalled.