The pr*sident was at it again on Wednesday. Something for world leaders to roll their eyes over wondering how long they’re going to have to put up with this juvenile nonsense:
Not exactly fresh. Six months ago, Vox catalogued 115 climate science denying tweets from Trump over the years. Like this one:
We could, as a couple of Daily Kos diarists have done here and here, put forth some facts about climate change not being the same as weather. We could point out the record heat waves in the Arctic and elsewhere, the record wildfires, the intensified storms, the extended seasons, the rising seas, the acidification of the oceans, the threat to a million species. And present a few graphs like this one:
But that’s all pointless. Donald Trump is impervious to facts. And he depends on his audience to be likewise. It’s impossible to know the actual climate change views of this nation’s most prominent grifter. Years ago, he accepted the science of climate change but has since found that making a joke of it, calling it a “hoax,” and implying it’s a liberal conspiracy works for him politically regardless of any pesky facts.
Since the beginning of the propaganda war waged against the science of climate change, we've been cursed by the clueless and the malicious, who actually believe that cold weather is proof global warming is a liberal trick, or proclaim that it is because saying so puts cash in their bank accounts—or because it furthers their personal political agenda.
We've become accustomed to hearing these numbskulls and liars trot out their bogus claims every time a bit of early snow or a longer-than-usual cold snap appears. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) gets the prize for performance art in this realm, having tossed a snowball kept in a freezer onto the floor of the Senate as proof of his two decades’ worth of claims that global warming is a hoax and that only God can change the climate.
But our presidents should be held to higher standards. They should at least be original in their denials. Especially with the news that the Antarctic is melting, Greenland’s glaciers are sliding faster into the sea, the flow of the Gulf Stream is slowing, and more than 400 American cities and towns will be among the world's thousands that could be at least partially submerged during the lifetime of people now breathing.
Given all the money that has flowed into denier lies and smears, why can't Donald Trump hire some sharp consultant to come up with something new and entertaining? Maybe put a few bucks into transforming one of the presidential limos into a coal-roller. Not truly original, but at least worth another round of photo ops.
However, it’s irrelevant what is believed about climate science by Trump, Sen. Jim Inhofe and two-thirds of the rest of the Republicans in Congress, the Koch brothers, or the Exxon guys in the ‘70s who chose to remain publicly silent about what their own researchers were telling them of the eventual impacts of greenhouse gases the fossil-fuel industry was adding to the atmosphere.
Irrelevant because global warming has a full head of steam now and what they believe about it or don’t will not make it go away. What matters is how they act. Trump’s science-denying appointments, budget cuts, regulation rollbacks, attempted rollbacks, announced withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, and loosening of offshore drilling rules all show us his intentions. Profiteering.
The good news is that a primary effect of his moves the past year is the galvanizing of leaders across the country to work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and meet the pledge of reductions the U.S. promised in Paris in 2015 when we had a real president in charge instead of the Commander-in-Tweet.
But just meeting the existing Paris pledges isn’t enough. The Democratic agenda should be a climate hawk agenda. We knew when the agreement was signed that these wouldn’t achieve the results called for: keeping average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline. Given that Climate Change Is Happening Faster Than Expected, and It’s More Extreme, we have to adopt more extreme policies to deal with it faster, too.