President Trump was unwittingly right this week while tweeting again about climate change, cold weather and “RECORDS BROKEN.”
The real record broken, however, was for Trump topping his own impressive dossier of ludicrous, maleficent and banal nonsense about what is arguably the greatest threat to the United States and most likely, all of mankind.
“Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS – Whatever happened to Global Warming?” — Trump said Wednesday in a tweet.
That was only part of Trump’s banner week.
The Trump Administration later in the week then worked to bury an annual climate change report from his own government, which refuted his fallacious weather conflation. It’s another move where Trump demonstrates what is either his ignorance of science or corrupt plot to refute it.
Each year, the American government is required to make an annual assessment on global climate change. The Trump White House released the alarming report on Black Friday, a spurious effort to try and bury it.
Even for a president who excels at flaunting his incompetence, his cruelty, his corruption and his obstinacy, Trump truly has outdone himself this week by trying to hide an authoritative, unequivocal rebuke of those, like himself, who either deny or ignore the threat of global warming.
“Climate change is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us,” according to scientists working for 13 U.S. government agencies other eminent researchers from across the nation, all writing for the annually mandated National Climate Assessment.
The report offers voluminous detail about how global warming, triggered by the use of gas, oil and coal, is hurting every region of the United States, damaging the economy, increasing deaths and boosting human illness and disease.
“Annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century — more than the current gross domestic product of many U.S. states,” the report says.
In addition to trillions of dollars and lives lost in massive hurricanes and wildfires fueled by a warming planet, Americans won’t have to wait decades to be threatened by climate change, the report makes clear.
“We are seeing the things we said would be happening, happen now in real life,” said one report co-author Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University, speaking to the Associated Press. “As a climate scientist, it is almost surreal.”
It’s a nightmare made only worse by a president and government leaders who openly scoff at the threat and the irrefutable science explaining it.
But this is a man who openly lies about any number of critical things, including, most recently, that his own government determined a top Saudi official ordered the murder of an American journalist. Americans are endangered not only because Trump so freely lies, but because so many Republican leaders in Congress give him cover or openly support Trump’s fabrications.
Trump is not alone in ignoring or lying about the danger. Right here in Colorado, Republican political leaders and pundits were enraged last week that Colorado will do an end run around an effort by the Trump Administration to stop the government from requiring new cars burn less fossil fuel. The higher fuel-efficiency requirements are an effort to stem global warming and produce less air pollution.
Gov. John Hickenlooper joined 12 other states this summer by ordering cars to meet California fuel consumption standards by 2022. Colorado and other states joined California after Trump ended the same nationwide requirements created by the Obama administration.
Colorado Republican leaders scoffed last week when a state agency made the adoption formal, saying that Colorado is ceding power to California, and that a bigger worry is cars with bigger sticker prices, even though owners will save the money in fuel consumption.
“An unelected board just unanimously decided to raise the cost of a new car in Colorado an average of $2,110,” Colorado GOP Senate officials said in a tweet. “The working class of Colorado needs relief from the state, not more costly regulations, fees, and taxes.”
The stunning disinformation is a revival of Trump Administration climate-change classics.
The vast majority of Americans and Colorado residents understand the looming danger climate change imposes on all of us.
More than a million Colorado residents now live in areas threatened by wildfires created or worsened by climate change. The livelihoods of millions of rural Colorado residents who make their living in agriculture are at risk as drought and severe weather threaten cattle and farming operations alike. The state’s tourism business, which pumps hundreds of billions of dollars each year into the state economy are also at risk from drought, wildfire and extreme weather.
It’s no longer enough to rebuke the hokum of clods and cons in Washington and the state Capitol. Americans must empower leaders who will take immediate action against the threat.
Anything else is putting our trust in Trump.