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.

February 23, 2019: Cow Farts and a Climate-Denier, Wife of a Coal Barron, Chosen for U.N. Ambassador

 

2/23/19: Another ordinary weekend in Trumpistan, which means extraordinary lunacy on display. 

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Almost every scientist in the world knows it’s a serious subject.

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Cow farts are in the news. “Cow farts” is the new “death panels for granny” phrase which the right will trot out to stupefy the uninformed and banish complex thought from right-wing craniums. After all, you can’t expect Trump fans to read a lengthy NASA report or count all the countries that believe climate change is a threat. You’re not going to hear Sean Hannity talk about the gaping hole in the Thwaites Glacier. You’re going to hear Fox News pundits boil down the Green New Deal to the God-given right of Americans to own flatulent bovines, instead. 

At that point it’s not a serious discussion, whereas almost every scientist in the world knows it’s a serious subject.

Cow farts...really, that's the level of discussion?

 

What we must do is unclear. So, you could discuss detailed scientific reports related to climate change, from NOAA or the Department of Defense. Or you could do what President Trump just did. 

Having nominated Heather Nauert, a former Fox News babe, to serve as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, he was forced to try again after she withdrew from consideration. 

Oh, please, please, tell me there’s an illegal immigrant in her story! Not exactly, but close! Nauert had long employed a nanny who was in the United States legally, but lacked papers required to work. That meant if Nauert filed tax documents the truth would out. So Nauert decided not to file the documents or mention the nanny while serving as spokeswoman for the State Department for two years. 

Once the promotion to ambassador was offered the back taxes were paid, but the damage was done. And there it was again: A Trump official undercutting American wages by hiring immigrant help. 

Just like Trump. 

 

Trump nominates climate change denier as U.N. ambassador. 

So Nauert was out and, ta da! Kelly Knight Craft was in! The new nominee is qualified for the U.N. post based on two criteria. First, she and her husband Joseph Craft III are big donors to the GOP. Second, she’s a climate change denier and Mr. Craft owns a big coal company in Kentucky. Asked in 2017, if she thought climate change was an issue, Ms. Craft did not reply, “Well, yes, because 2017, 2016 and 2015 have been the three hottest years ever recorded.” 

She did not say, “Nearly 200 countries agree climate change is a threat and under this president we are the only nation in the world to withdraw from talks on the issue.” 

Instead, she gave the: my-husband-sells-coal-and-so-I-will-give-you-a-cow-farts-type-of-response. “I believe there are scientists on both sides [emphasis added] that are accurate,” Ms. Craft said. “I think that both sides have their own results, from their studies, and I appreciate and I respect both sides of the science.” 

That is exactly the kind of answer you’d expect from the ill-informed, unqualified-for-her-post-wife of a coal baron. 

Mr. Craft isn’t just a coal baron. He’s a really powerful coal baron. If he cares about the future of the planet, he cares about being rich far more. Last year, he earned $1,361,390 for his work at Alliance Holding GP. He is “a former Chairman and current Board member of the National Coal Council, a Board Member of the National Mining Association, and a Director and current Chairman of American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.” Craft was, until 2012, a billionaire. A divorce from his first wife knocked him off the billionaire pedestal and left him a pauper with a paltry $625 million. You figure he needed the fat tax cuts he got under the Trump Tax Plan. 

You might imagine that this story about Ms. Craft would be the only time you heard about climate deniers all week. With the Trump administration you would be wrong. The New York Times acquired a memo indicating that a Presidential Committee on Climate Security will soon be impaneled, consisting of 12 individuals, including William Happer, who is to head the team. 

As Newsweek explains, Happer is, shall we say, “out there” when it comes to the topic of climate change: 

[The] Princeton physicist is a known climate change denier, who once compared the “demonization of carbon dioxide” to the “demonization of poor Jews under Hitler.”

 

In 2015, Happer made news after undercover members of the environmental campaign group Greenpeace posed as oil company representatives and persuaded him to write a scientific paper, The New York Times reported. He assured them it would be an unpaid “labor of love.”

 

Happer told the Greenpeace members, whom he believed were from an unnamed oil company: “More CO₂ will benefit the world. The only way to limit CO₂ would be to stop using fossil fuels, which I think would be a profoundly immoral and irrational policy.”