Scientist Peter Gleick Offers Comment On Shitstain Tweets: "Pandering"; "Ignorant"; "Doesn't Care"

[hatrack]

EDIT

Mother Jones: Is our water really being diverted into the ocean? And are our firefighters complaining that they don’t have enough water to tackle the wildfires in the north?

Peter Gleick: That’s completely absurd! There is no environmental law that has put any limits whatsoever on the amount of water available to fight these fires. There’s no shortage of water to fight these fires. Of course, it’s always extremely difficult to understand what Donald Trump’s tweets mean or what he thinks he’s saying or what he knows. California water policy is very complicated. There are many laws, policies, and historical practices that have determined where water goes, who gets to use it, and how much is left in our rivers.

Both of the president’s tweets reveal a profound misunderstanding of the way California water works. It’s not that we’re diverting water into the Pacific Ocean. The tiny amount of water that reaches the Pacific Ocean these days is what’s left after we’ve diverted the vast majority of our rivers to cities and farms. He just has this completely backward. And furthermore, there’s no water policy that would have made these fires worse. We don’t take water from the forest. The forest provides water to use, and water is allocated to farmers and to cities and a little bit to the fish. And what’s left is in the rivers. And it flows down to our ecosystems. There’s just nothing in his tweet that makes any sense, except maybe the very last line.

MJ: “Must also tree clear to stop fire spreading.” What is he referring to there?

PG: I imagine he’s throwing a bone to the lumber industry, which would like to do more cutting. There isn’t any disagreement that California forest policy—and forest policy in the United States—shouldn’t be better. Everybody agrees it should be better. That’s been true for decades. Whether a different forest policy and timber policy put in place decades ago would have changed the risk of forest fire, we don’t really know. We do know we need to do a better job at managing forests. But I don’t think that is what he’s commenting on. He’s also completely ignoring the other reality, which is that years of severe drought have killed California forests and left a lot of fire material available. And climate change is causing extreme heat and extreme weather that is making these fires worse.

EDIT

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/08/water-expert-peter-gleick-deconstructs-donald-trump-california-wildfire-tweets/

[Danmel]

1. Not only dangerously ignornant, but callous and indifferent

Not one word of sympathy to the families of dead firefighters, or other victims of the fires. Not one word of sympathy or offer of assistance to people who have lost everything
Not one offer of federal assistance to fight the inferno.
He is a profoundly f'd up individual.

[C_U_L8R]

2. I used to know some meth and coke users

They'd confabulate things just like Trump. Maybe it's not meth that he's on but Sniffles sure behaves like there's some great manic imbalance in his thinking. He's really fucked up.