Trump and other denialists are denying that climate disruption is part of the reason that wildfires are stronger and larger. They attribute it all to buildup of organic matter. But they won't answer when you ask them why the fires are so much worse in warm weather, and lessen when the temperatures cool. And why are they so much less of a problem in the winter, when there is a new layer of dead dry leaves on the forest floors?
Many people cannot seem to grasp that phenomena can have a combinations of causes. Some of this might be due to innate differences in psychology. But it seems to me some is due to the way we teach and test, requiring students to come up with the one and only right answer.
by David Atkins
September 13, 2020
The catastrophic consequences of climate change are already making themselves felt all over the world. But nowhere is it more obvious today than in the American west, where unprecedented wildfires are raging, billowing plumes of smoke, turning the skies orange and forcing those without air conditioning or suffering from power blackouts to choose between breathing unsafe air or enduring stifling heat indoors. The scenes are almost apocalyptic:
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And yes, Rush Limbaugh notwithstanding, the intensity and severity of the fires is directly attributable to the climate crisis:
“This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “Maybe we underestimated the magnitude and speed” at which these events would occur, he said, but “we’ve seen this long freight train barreling down on us for decades, and now the locomotive is on top of us, with no caboose in sight.”
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In a matter of weeks, California has experienced six of the 20 largest wildfires in modern history and toppled all-time temperature records from the desert to the coast. Millions are suffering from some of the worst air quality in years due to heat-triggered smog and fire smoke. A sooty plume has blanketed most of the West Coast, blotting out the sun and threatening people’s lungs during a deadly pandemic…
“What we’ve been seeing in California are some of the clearest events where we can say this is climate change — that climate change has clearly made this worse,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute, an Oakland-based think tank. “People who have lived in California for 30, 40 years are saying this is unprecedented, it has never been this hot, it has never been this smoky in all the years I’ve lived here.”
The impacts of the climate crisis are also being felt on the east coast in many forms, including record heat waves, snowfalls, and especially hurricanes, doubling the number of storms in a given year:
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On the current track, we are headed to a future not just of discomfort and disruption, but likely catasrophe for human civilization itself.
Which makes it entirely unsurprising that Donald Trump continues not only to do nothing about the issue, but to actively misinform the public and make matters worse. Most recently he named one of the world’s most prominent climate science deniers to a key position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, commonly known at the NOAA:
David Legates, a University of Delaware professor of climatology who has spent much of his career questioning basic tenets of climate science, has been hired for a top position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Legates confirmed to NPR that he was recently hired as NOAA’s deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction. The position suggests that he reports directly to Neil Jacobs, the acting head of the agency that is in charge of the federal government’s sprawling weather and climate prediction work.
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Legates is a professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware. He is also affiliated with the Heartland Institute, a think tank that has poured money into convincing Americans that climate change is not happening and that the scientific evidence — including evidence published by the agency that now employs Legates — is uncertain or untrustworthy.
[The Heartland Institute receives much of its funding from the fossil fuel industry.]
The purpose of appointing him to NOAA is almost certainly to meddle and interfere with NOAA’s climate science predictions, at a time when accurate predictions will be more crucial than ever in driving the sort of transformative policies that will be needed to stave off total devastation.
It’s just one more way in which Trump and the conservative movement are sowing chaos, hurting people and the environment, and making it harder to pull the country back from the brink.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/david-legates
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Legates and Soon have authored numerous papers together, including a controversial 2007 “polar bear study” that was partially funded by Koch Industries. Legates was the co-author on four of the 11 papers that Soon received fossil fuel funding for – and failed to disclose in the paper.
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