Donald Trump is a deeply stupid man.
Trump isn't the first to blither such idiocy, and he won’t be the last. And while it's sometimes unclear whether some of those promoting this drivel actually believe it or merely hope that their listeners and followers will believe it, there is no doubt that Trump believes it. Because he is a deeply stupid man.
The best response came from actual climate scientist Kate Marvel, and you'll want to bookmark this one, or screen grab it, or otherwise preserve it in whatever way you prefer. Because it's the best single response to this oft-repeated idiocy you're likely ever to see.
But just days later Trump doubled down, of course, this time with a bonus Trump misspelling. Because Donald Trump is a deeply stupid man.
Donald thinks he made a funny, never mind that people's lives are at stake. A deeply stupid man thinks he one-upped people who understand science and facts and reality, and he's chuckling to himself about it. And not that he ever cares about the opinions of experts, but this time actual government scientists responded.
As did other scientists.
And some even referred back to this short video from 2014, featuring President Obama's science and technology adviser John Holdren explaining the polar vortex:
In a nutshell, as explained by Bob Berwyn of the Pulitzer Prize-winning InsideClimate News:
The northern polar jet stream (it has a counterpart in the Southern Hemisphere) is driven partly by the temperature contrast between masses of icy air over the North Pole and warmer air near the equator. Climate change, true to the predictions of the past half century, has led to faster warming in the Arctic than in the temperate zones. So the temperature difference between the two regions has been lessening.
Research suggests that this reduction in the temperature difference is robbing the jet stream of some of its strength, making it wobblier and contributing to more temperature extremes.
Furthermore:
The globe as a whole is still much warmer than normal, and scientists say the cold snap in parts of the U.S. in no way invalidates the overwhelming scientific evidence showing global average temperatures are increasing due to the burning of fossil fuels for energy.
In fact, studies published in the past several years show that polar vortex disruptions may be more likely as the Earth warms and sea ice in the Arctic melts, though this is an active area of research.
The new normal:
Get used to it. The polar vortex has been wandering more often in recent years.
It all started with misplaced Moroccan heat. Last month, the normally super chilly air temperatures 20 miles above the North Pole rapidly rose by about 125 degrees (70 degrees Celsius), thanks to air flowing in from the south. It’s called “sudden stratospheric warming.”
That warmth split the polar vortex, leaving the pieces to wander, said Judah Cohen, a winter storm expert for Atmospheric Environmental Research, a commercial firm outside Boston.
“Where the polar vortex goes, so goes the cold air,” Cohen said.
Global warming will not always be uniform and it won't always be about warming. It's about changing climates, which are enormously complicated, and those changes mean increased extremes. Climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe coined the phrase "global weirding" to help clarify popular understanding. A heating world will not always be warmer everywhere, and not simply because seasons still happen. Zooming back out from this one weather event in one region of the planet and zooming back in to the world of science and facts, where people who are not deeply stupid dwell, things are not looking good. Even the converted skeptics at Berkeley Earth now produce shocking media based on the data:
Even amidst this brutal winter, the proof is everywhere. As Trump gleefully tweets about the cold, the past month actually revealed even more ominous effects of global warming.
- Greenland's massive ice sheets are melting, even in winter, and they're melting even faster than had been previously thought.
- The retreat of Arctic glaciers is revealing landscapes not seen in 120,000 years.
- Overall, the Arctic region may be experiencing its warmest century in 115,000 years.
- The Barents Sea is undergoing a rapid climate shift, and scientists warn that it could spread to other parts of the Arctic.
- The melt of North American glaciers also is accelerating.
- The oceans are warming faster than had been previously thought.
- And on the other side of the globe, where the deeply stupid Donald Trump probably doesn't realize it's summer, Australia is blistering through record heat, killing wild horses and decimating flying fox populations, with bats falling dead from trees.
Climate change is happening faster than predicted. The impacts are happening now, and they are greater than had been expected. The overall trend has been that when climate predictions are proven wrong, it is because they were too conservative. Humanity has never faced a more dire and comprehensive crisis. And while some pretend to care about the financial costs of addressing climate change, the costs of the damage done by climate change are themselves enormous, threatening to devastate global GDP by 5 to 20 percent, and to shrink the U.S. economy by 10 percent before the end of the century.
And it gets worse.
For years, military leaders and official military analyses have been sounding the alarm that climate change is a threat to national security. And while Trump created an actual national crisis by hyping a false security threat at the border, the Pentagon has been warning that climate change will create more refugees. Indeed, climate change already has triggered refugee crises, and estimates of total climate refugees to come vary from hundreds of millions to a billion or even possibly billions. But whatever the ultimate numbers, this unprecedented global threat will create the worst refugee crisis ever.
And, of course, despite years of these sirens being sounded by military and economic leaders and analysts, Trump's administration has such warnings removed from his administration's official assessments. In the midst of this global crisis, on every level the deeply stupid Donald Trump not only isn't helping, he is making things worse. He's trying to gut research and development of clean alternative energy technologies. He's subsidizing the coal industry, expanding offshore oil drilling, opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, and so severely slashing auto emissions standards that not only the states are opposed to his rollbacks, but so is the auto industry itself. It's all part of Trump's larger war on the environment, gifting billions of dollars of savings to polluting industries at massive social cost—one that will also cost lives.
While hundreds of countries last December hammered out the next phase of the international effort to address climate change, Trump refused to have the United States sign on. Thanks to Trump, in addressing the most important issue humanity has ever faced, the United States is a global pariah. Because of Trump the world's strongest economy—and until Trump, the world's mightiest nation—now not only is failing to lead the world in addressing the world's greatest crisis, the United States is standing alone in deliberately refusing to help at all. On the contrary, the United States, because of Trump, is deliberately doing what it can to make the crisis worse.
A time bomb is ticking, and Donald Trump is hastening its detonation.