Shitstain Doesn't "Believe" Climate Assesment; Climate Doesn't Care
Publicly, President Trump says he doesn’t believe the CIA or the FBI when they tell him Vladimir Putin fucked with the 2016 election. He also says he doesn’t believe the CIA when they tell him the Saudi crown prince ordered the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. For Trump, alliances are all about power and money, not morality or justice. So it’s hardly surprising that when confronted with a new report by America’s top government scientists about the dire impacts of climate change, Trump says, “I don’t believe it.”
The Fourth National Assessment of Climate Change, which is the first detailed climate report to be issued by government scientists while Trump has been in office, was publicly released the day after Thanksgiving, which is traditionally one of the slowest news days of the year. The intent couldn’t be clearer: Bury the news in a pile of shopping lists and move on to something more appealing to Trump’s base, like tear-gassing migrant families at the Mexican border. It’s not hard to guess why Trump wants to discredit and deny the report. It is nothing less than a smackdown of the president – a longtime climate denier and fossil-fuel promoter – from America’s own government scientists. It highlights Trump’s profoundly destructive idiocy on climate change, and is about as close as a group of nerdy scientists can come to an indictment against a sitting president for crimes against humanity.
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But it’s the economic costs of climate change that are most damning for Trump’s vision of the world. By pushing fossil fuels and ignoring the ever-increasing risks of climate change, he is essentially stealing from the future. The report points out that by the end of the century, warming on our current trajectory would cost the U.S. economy upward of $500 billion a year in crop damage, lost labor and extreme weather damages. “With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century —more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states,” according to the report. By 2090, in a worst-case climate-change scenario, labor-related losses as a result of extreme heat — which makes it difficult to work outdoors or lowers worker productivity — could total $155 billion annually. Deaths from temperature extremes could take an economic toll of $141 billion per year, while coastal property damage could total $118 billion a year.
In the end, what separates this report from others is not precise numbers and better modeling results; it’s that given the state of our world today, it’s impossible not to read it as an overtly political document. The report was released just days after the worst wildfire in California history, which now feels like a drama-in-real-life movie ripped from the pages of the report.
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-denies-climate-report-760124/
