He mocked the science of climate change
The Times on that climate change report:
The report, which was mandated by Congress and made public by the White House, is notable not only for the precision of its calculations and bluntness of its conclusions, but also because its findings are directly at odds with President Trump’s agenda of environmental deregulation, which he asserts will spur economic growth.
Mr. Trump has taken aggressive steps to allow more planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks, and has vowed to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, under which nearly every country in the world pledged to cut carbon emissions. Just this week, he mocked the science of climate change because of a cold snap in the Northeast, tweeting, “Whatever happened to Global Warming?”
But in direct language, the 1,656-page assessment lays out the devastating effects of a changing climate on the economy, health and environment, including record wildfires in California, crop failures in the Midwest and crumbling infrastructure in the South. Going forward, American exports and supply chains could be disrupted, agricultural yields could fall to 1980s levels by midcentury and fire season could spread to the Southeast, the report finds.
The report is issued every four years, as required by law.
The previous report, issued in May 2014, concluded with nearly as much scientific certainty, but not as much precision on the economic costs, that the tangible impacts of climate change had already started to cause damage across the country. It cited increasing water scarcity in dry regions, torrential downpours in wet regions and more severe heat waves and wildfires.
The results of the 2014 report helped inform the Obama administration as it wrote a set of landmark climate change regulations. The following year, the E.P.A. finalized President Barack Obama’s signature climate change policy, known as the Clean Power Plan, which aimed to slash planet-warming emissions from coal-fired power plants. At the end of the 2015, Mr. Obama played a lead role in brokering the Paris Agreement.
He didn’t do it because he’s some touchy-feely hippy, you know. He did it because it’s already bad and it’s going to get horrendous, so a responsible president ought to work hard to mitigate it.
But in 2016, Republicans in general and Mr. Trump in particular campaigned against those regulations. In rallies before cheering coal miners, Mr. Trump vowed to end what he called Mr. Obama’s “war on coal” and to withdraw from the Paris deal. Since winning the election, his administration has move decisively to roll back environmental regulations.
Make America a dust bowl again.
This ‘argument’ became the “if we came from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys” of the slightly more modern age like 20 years ago. Insofar as I was ever a callow youth I was rolling my eyes at that argument well before I celebrated the millennium after – as I choose to remember it – single-handedly saving everyone from the millenium bug.
If I remember rightly, the 2014 report said, among many other dismal things, that California didn’t really have any water left and was fucked and everything would catch fire. I might be paraphrasing, but that’s probably what I’d have said if I’d written the report.
This is why I’m not allowed to write reports these days, but I reckon that’s a poor decision by so-called right-thinking people. My papers, when I was an academic, were as inconsequential as most scientific papers. And probably as boring as most. But I usually managed to work in something vaguely comedic. There was one about a chocolate orange, which was an early paper on cloud computing. there was one about swatting a fly which was about machine learning. It was referred to in the community for a while as “that fucking fly paper”. There was one about online gaming that showed there are some quite good and respectable stats about player behaviour in massively multiplayer online games…. but somehow no good evidence from the same sources when it came to how men interacted with women.
I just think that if you’re going to write papers that – let’s face it – nobody is ever going to read, you should take the piss.
Anyway, I think it’s right that the 2014 report indicated dire consequences for California, which are happening pretty much exactly as predicted. Even I couldn’t have worked in anything comical there.