YOU CAN ALL JUST DIE, PART 12: WHO NEEDS A PLANET TO LIVE ON?

There is so much corruption, incompetence, cruelty, stupidity, autocracy, and pure evil being spun by Trump and his cabinet of clown car miscreants it’s impossible to capture even a small portion of it, even if posting on a daily basis. So I offer this post, acknowledging it is a small sample of the damage the psychopath in the Oval Office is doing to the United States, to our democracy, to the world, and the future of humanity. But today’s subject is even more important than the Epstein scandal.

The evidence is overwhelming, the climate crisis is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced, and there isn’t a close second. Those who deny the climate crisis do so for purely political reasons, willful ignorance or dishonesty, or the lack of sufficient critical thinking skills to realize when they are being lied to. The Republican War on Science involves all three. Whether it’s from psychics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, biology, physiology, ecology, pharmacology, or toxicology—the scientific method is the foundation of modern society and every convenience you enjoy originated from the scientific method. The science of how green houses gases are warming the planet and altering normal weather patterns is actually rather simple and should be well understood by anyone with even a modest capability for grasping how science works. It is as scientifically verifiable as the earth is a sphere, not flat.

What the Trump Administration and the Republican climate nihilists in Congress are peddling is as much of a scientific absurdity and divorced from reality as claiming that 2+2 = 5, or that gravity doesn’t exist.

The greenhouse gas effect in warming the atmosphere was first described by a French mathematician working for Napoleon, Joseph Fourier, in the 1820s. British physicist, John Tyndall, conducted experiments in the 1850s proving how greenhouse gases absorb infrared and energy in even very small amounts. In 1856 Eunice Foot presented findings to the American Association for Advancement of Science that water vapor and carbon dioxide cause the air to warm in sunlight. Nobel Prize winning Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius recognized that burning coal could increase carbon dioxide and warm the climate in 1896.

In 1949 George Callendar found that atmospheric CO2 was increasing and temperatures were rising and the two were related. In 1958 the Bell Telephone Science Hour addressed how humans could be changing the Earth’s climate through CO2 from fossil fuel combustion. Daily measurements of atmospheric CO2 at the Hawaiian observatory began in 1958.

Finally, Exxon Mobil was the first of several Big Oil corporations whose own in-house scientists predicted global warming from burning fossil fuels with shocking accuracy in the 1970s. If the global warming climate crisis is a hoax, it began over 200 years ago and has involved virtually the entire world’s scientific community ever since then, including those who worked for Big Oil.

Over 99.9% of all climate studies have concluded that human caused releases of greenhouse gases are warming the atmosphere, creating an existential crisis. Every serious scientific organization in the world has signed on to that conclusion. No scientific concept has ever had that much universal agreement.

The climate crisis is already driving up the global cost of food. It is increasing home owners insurance throughout the country. Wildfire pollution now blankets much of the earth for months at a time. Drought is shriveling up water sources in every continent, punctuated by deadly floods. And we’re just at the beginning of what’s in store for us.

The most active climate scientists have warned that we are within only a few years of reaching tipping points where feedback loops will almost certainly accelerate global warming to truly apocalyptic levels. In other words, we are near the point where we will have made much of where humans now live, essentially uninhabitable, devastating agriculture, burning up huge swaths of our forests, mass killing of marine life, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and extreme weather catastrophes of every kind.

Trump’s head of EPA has made no secret of his intention to eviscerate the EPA’s ability to protect our air, water, food, and the broader environment from the pollution of the fossil fuel and chemical industries. He now is planning to kill the EPA’s ability to address the climate crisis in any way. Specifically he plans to make a ruling that greenhouse gas emissions do not threaten human life by dangerously warming the planet. “…it would not only erase all current limits on greenhouse gas pollution from cars, factories, power plants and other sources. It would prevent future administrations from trying to tackle climate change, with lasting implications."

Given the overwhelming evidence of the inevitable suffering, misery, societal upheaval, mass migrations, and human death on a completely unprecedented scale that this will cause, what they are committing is the greatest moral atrocity of all time. The slaughtering of human life by Genghis Kahn, the Qing dynasty, European colonizers of Indigenous Americans, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot (The Khmer Rouge)—combined, will pale in comparison to what scientists are warning will happen from the climate crisis.

There are countless reasons to be apoplectic at the Trump Administration. But this is reason #1.