While President Trump’s threat to declare a national emergency as a pretense to build his monument to white nationalism on the southern border has been rightfully decried as an abuse of power, it’s actually not the only time he’s threatened to deploy this classic authoritarian tactic to subvert democracy.
Besides racism, one of Trump’s other loves is coal, and he’s floated the idea of using emergency powers to save the coal and nuclear power industries from the free market, and gotten plenty of pushback on it. One major reason for this proposal is the claim that the ability to store fuel on-site makes these sources more reliable in times of extreme weather--like the polar vortex.
Well, we just had one. Did it demonstrate that the grid is in such bad shape that it warrants a national emergency? No. The grid was fine, and the cold weather didn’t give utilities any reason to question the transition to renewables.
So while racist morons on Fox News may question whether the light and dark are the same as hot and cold, reality showed the depth of their dingusitude.
Amazingly, though, that’s not even the dumbest take. While some merely ranted about the media coverage describing how the polar vortex is consistent with climate change, like a post Anthony Watts picked up from white nationalism-laundering Breitbart, one response from denialworld really takes the cake.
Valerie Richardson, the organized denial machine’s reliable scribe at the far-right, Christian-cult-owned Washington Times, picked up a blog post by Roy Spencer to push back on the science connecting the vortex with climate change. (If our post last week wasn’t enough, Dr. Michael Mann has a snappy piece in the Guardian laying out the science and Carbon Brief also published a great explainer. The short version: a warming Arctic can lead to a weakened jet stream, which allows for the occasional mass of cold Arctic air to drop down over the US.)
The pushback from Spencer, a longtime denier of the threat posed by global warming, took the form of a graph from his partner in crime John Christy showing that cold winter weather has gotten less frequent over the 20th century. But for anyone not blinded by denial, there’s no contradiction. An overall long-term warming trend, as the graph shows, isn’t going to be offset by a freak occurrence (a polar vortex) that happens a handful of times at the very end of that 120+ year record.
In their desperation to disprove that climate change may spur freak cold snaps, the dynamic duo managed to cook up a graph showing how winters are experiencing fewer cold weather spells. Apparently, the fact that winters are warming is supposed to make us doubt global warming.
This sort of stellar logic and intelligence must certainly be why the Trump administration tapped Christy for the EPA’s Science Advisory Board.
Only the very best, after all…
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