9/12/20: It’s a brutal weekend for
people in California, Oregon, and Washington. Massive fires ravage those states.
People living in Portland, Oregon are advised to be ready to evacuate.
Flames threaten the city of 650,000 from the south.
Dozens of
people in California are missing as fast moving blazes sweep over homes and
towns. Fire season is far from over across the American West – and five million acres have already been
turned to ash.
Climate
change writ large.
____________________
“He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the
researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its
greatest challenges.”
The
editors of Scientific American, calling on voters to reject President
Trump
____________________
Yet, behind
the scenes, Team Trump has added another hack to its lineup of
All-Star prevaricators. David
Legates is a geography professor at the University of Delaware. That sounds promising.
Unfortunately, as Science magazine reports, he “has a long history
of questioning fundamental climate science and has suggested that an outcome of
burning fossil fuels would be a more habitable planet for humans
[emphasis added, unless otherwise noted].”
Legates will serve as deputy assistant of commerce for observation
and prediction at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Science doesn’t pull any punches:
Legates has spent his career
denying consensus climate science while elevating the work of fringe
researchers and industry-funded scientists. He has claimed that addressing
climate change would do more harm than good, and he has said pumping more
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would benefit humanity.
When testifying before the House
of Representatives Natural Resources Committee last year, Legates blamed
natural variations for the unprecedented level of warming that scientists say
is caused by the release of carbon dioxide from human activity.
“Climate has always changed, and
weather is always variable, due to complex, powerful natural forces,” Legates
said. “No efforts to stabilize the climate can possibly be successful.”
Legates has also said that
teaching children about climate change was an effort “to satisfy the climate
change fearmongering agenda that pervades our society today.”
Other highlights of his career include co-authoring a paper
that questioned findings about the role of climate change in destroying polar
bear habitat. This fine work was funded in part by grants from the American
Petroleum Institute and Koch Industries, InsideClimate News reports.
You can tell who Legates is by listening to his defenders. One
is Myron Ebell, a
climate denier himself, the man who headed up President Trump’s E.P.A.
transition team. That would be the team that saddled us with the
much-investigated Scott Pruitt as administrator of the E.P.A.
According
to Ebell, Legates will bring real science to his job. “This is the kind of
thing we have been pushing for since before Trump was elected,” Ebell claimed, “to
get real science into the assessment, instead of junk science, which NASA and
NOAA have been doing for years.”
Yeah.
F**k those scientists at NASA. We’ve got a geography professor – and Big Oil and Gas on our side.
*
TO SHOW YOU
just how impressed real scientists are when it comes to picks like Legate, the
magazine Scientific American has issued its first ever presidential endorsement
in 175 years.
Breaking
with tradition dating back to Zachary Taylor, editors say they are “compelled”
to support Joe Biden.
The
evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and
its people – because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating
example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic,
which cost more than 190,000 Americans
their lives by the
middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical
care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country
prepare for its greatest challenges.
That
is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to
protect our health, our economy and the environment…[He will] set the country
back on course for a safer, more prosperous and more equitable future.
(See also:
9/14/20.)
