In Visiting a Charred California, Trump Confronts a Scientific Reality He Denies

[Zorro]

A president who has mocked climate change and pushed policies that accelerate it is set to be briefed on the scorched earth and ash-filled skies that experts say are the predictable result.

When President Trump flies to California on Monday to assess the state’s raging forest fires, he will come face to face with the grim consequences of a reality he has stubbornly refused to accept: the devastating effects of a warming planet.

To the global scientific community, the acres of scorched earth and ash-filled skies across the American West are the tragic, but predictable, result of accelerating climate change. Nearly two years ago, federal government scientists concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels could triple the frequency of severe fires across the Western states.

But the president has used his time in the nation’s highest office to aggressively promote the burning of fossil fuels, chiefly by rolling back or weakening every major federal policy intended to combat dangerous emissions. At the same time, Mr. Trump and his senior environmental officials have regularly mocked, denied or minimized the established science of human-caused climate change.

Now, as he battles for a second term in the White House, Mr. Trump has doubled down on his anti-climate agenda as a way of appealing to his core supporters. At a rally in Pennsylvania last month, he blamed California’s failure to “clean your floors” of leaves, threatening to “make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/us/politics/california-fires-trump-climate-change.html

[Cirque du So-What]

1. You can lead a horse's ass to firefighting water

but you can’t make him think.

[orwell]

2. I can see that he is only trying...

...to avoid causing a "panic."

[moondust]

3. Fossil fuels asshole 100 percent.

He's done if he loses the fossil fuel states including the frackers plus the Kochs and other big fossil fuel donors. Those damn windmills are the problem and don't you forget it!

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

4. I'd like to see just once to do some of the raking he thinks is needed.

I doubt he could last more than a minute.

[A HERETIC I AM]

5. His perception of the totality of wilderness...

Is Central Park.

That’s it. He thinks you can “clean the floors” of several hundred thousand square miles of forest in North America because you can do it to the small portion of Central Park that is wooded.