On Saturday, NASA released figures showing that we just had the hottest April on record. This is the 12th consecutive month to set a monthly temperature record. Until this past October, we'd never seen global average temperatures pass the 20th-century average by more than 1°C--but every single month since has exceeded that margin.
This context makes the politics in my state drive me crazy.
In the first half of what will without doubt be the hottest year on record, Texas Republicans passed a resolution that denies that climate change is happening, and makes climate science denialism an official plank of the Texas Republican platform for 2016.
This kind of behavior is what makes many Texas politicians an embarrassment on the national stage--like my district's current congressman, Rep. Lamar Smith.
Texan Republican leaders are basically asking their rank-and-file members to pretend they are stupid. They want them to ignore satellite photography, measurements from ocean buoys, and other instruments that not only record rising temperatures, but also undeniable visual evidence of the things you'd expect when the world heats up--things like Arctic ice melting at an alarmingly fast rate, far faster than any year on record at this time of year.
The thing is, Texans aren't stupid. When polled, 63 percent of Texans believe global warming is happening, 61 percent believe it will harm future generations, and 74 percent support regulating CO2 as a pollutant.
This kind of anti-science, group enforced ignorance may appeal to big-money donors and the hardest of the hardcore anti-science ingrates, but it alienates everyone else.
Everyone else knows the truth: Climate science denialism endangers everyone, and we don't have time for this kind of lunatic conspiracy-theory paranoia in our politics anymore.