President Donald Trump on Monday dismissed a study produced by his own administration, involving 13 federal agencies and more than 300 leading climate scientists, warning of the potentially catastrophic impact of climate change.
Why, you ask?
“I don’t believe it,” Trump told reporters on Monday, adding that he had read “some” of the report.
On one level, this shouldn’t be surprising. Trump’s views on climate change at this point are very, very well established.
Just over eight years ago, he tweeted this: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” In 2014, he penned this tweet: “It’s late in July and it is really cold outside in New York. Where the hell is GLOBAL WARMING??? We need some fast! It’s now CLIMATE CHANGE.”
And then, this from last Wednesday: “Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming?”
(Here are 20 more times in which Trump has dismissed the idea of global warming and/or climate change.)
All of which brings me to last Friday – 48 hours after Trump’s how-can-the-world’s-climate-be-changing-if-it’s-cold-in-half-the-country-on-one-day tweet – and the moved-up release of the Fourth National Climate Assessment.
If you missed the study’s release, well, that was the point. It was originally slated to be made public next month but was suddenly released on the day after Thanksgiving, aka Black Friday, when the country shops, eats, hangs with family and pays a total of zero attention to what’s going on in politics. Outside of Christmas and the actual day of Thanksgiving, there’s no better day to drop bad news that you don’t want people to see.
Because there are VERY few coincidences in politics, the decision to speed up the release of the report to the day after Thanksgiving – rather than, say, today – was clearly a move by the administration to cover up what they see to be bad news. Or, better put, news that challenges Trump’s fact-free position that all of this talk of global warming and climate change is belied by, uh, the fact that it was cold in the Northeast on the day before Thanksgiving.
The report, the second of four such annual studies commissioned by Congress, concludes not only that the world’s temperature is rising and but also that the preponderance of evidence suggests human actions play a role in it. The report’s authors conclude that the changing climate “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.” And that, unless we change our practices and policies, there will be “substantial damages to the US economy, environment, and human health and well-being over the coming decades.”
The report goes on to detail the economic impact of climate change (hundreds of billions lost, with farms being hardest hit) and the physical toll it could take on our collective health, as factors like air quality, disease transmission by insects, food and water will “increasingly threaten the health and well-being of the American people.”
It’s, candidly, a terrifying read. Unless we start making some major changes – and soon – we face the very real potential of crossing the point of no return when it comes to the planet’s warming, and the consequences that result from it.