Erasing the scientific finding
Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.
The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.
We love heat waves! And droughts, and wildfires!
Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.
The administration is saying that because it knows better. Who knows more about climate science than Trump? Besides everyone?
At issue is what’s known as the endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to Americans’ health and welfare. The finding was based on more than 200 pages of research and evidence.
Mr. Trump, who has called climate scientists “stupid people,” claimed on Thursday that the finding “had no basis in fact”
For nearly 17 years, the E.P.A. had relied on the bedrock finding to justify regulations that limit carbon dioxide, methane and other pollution from oil and gas wells, tailpipes, smokestacks and other sources that burn fossil fuels. By repealing the endangerment finding, the United States is likely to emit up to 18 billion metric tons of additional emissions into the atmosphere between now and 2055, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group. That is about three times the amount of climate pollution the country emitted last year.
Never mind. It builds character.
Great, let’s just get it over with.
Any future worth having is pretty much ruled out at this point anyway…
Their logic – and I use the word very wrongly – is that the planet has been much hotter in the past and is just going through another naturally-occurring warm phase. It follows from this that a: because previous warmer phases didn’t kill everything off then this one won’t, and b: there were no humans around to pollute the atmosphere during the previous warm phases, and despite all the environmental protections that are currently in place and have been for a several years, the planet is still getting warmer, therefore man-made pollution isn’t the cause.
Who needs egghead scientists when you can use common sense like that?
Yes, the world was hotter before. And there were no humans around. In fact, it was probably too hot for humans. There were different species because a hotter world will hold different species than a cooler world. So what they’re saying is that it is okay to have a hotter world with no humans. Okay, I’m good with that!
When I last visited my sister, her husband (not MAGA, not even Republican) was going on the same way. After all, there are natural cycles. So why are we calling it something different now?
Okay, brother-in-law (and President), let me put it in words you can understand. Just because the world warmed in the past without humans does not mean it is not human-caused now. ALL CLIMATE SCIENTISTS ARE AWARE OF THE NATURAL CYCLES (enough caps to convince Trump? Do I need a few exclamation points?) When they created those global warming models, they figured the natural cycles and the natural causes of warm weather into the cycles. Because ALL CLIMATE SCIENTISTS ARE AWARE OF THE NATURAL CYCLES. (Thought I’d all caps again for the sake of the twtitoddlers.)
I don’t expect Trump to accept that; I know my brother-in-law did not. (He’s sort of a Trump with more charm and less conservative politics; my husband and I call him ‘The Great One’ – not as a compliment.) When you know everything, than anyone who disagrees with you knows nothing. Trump is not the only self-declared very stable genius – though my b-i-l at least has enough savvy to get his wife to make those declarations for him.
Well, sure, but all those climate scientists are raking in the big bucks from, uh…, ummmm…, Soros! Yeah, that’s it!
But seriously, one thing about living so close to DC is you meet a lot of people who work for the government. Our next door neighbors were until very recently EPA scientists, but they’ve both retired now in disgust. The husband is close to retirement age anyway, but the wife probably could have had another good decade or two in her career. Such a waste.
As our friend AoS can no doubt confirm, Carl himself warned us long ago that “if you don’t worry about it [CO2 emissions and global heating] NOW, it will be too late later on.” That was 1985 (before the US Congress).
Think two generations later is “too late”? Of course it is.
Trump’s petty gesture is just a fly speck on a gigantic tsunami of thermal inertia coming our way.
[…] as Mike B points out, it’s too late anyway. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic […]