DISHONEST DONALD

Dishonest Donald denies that global warming is occurring.  He is hoisting the flag of anti-intellectualism in order to lead the reactionary charge against all things scientific.  His kind of medieval and muddled thinking should have died out long ago but atavistic “throw-backs” do occur and he is the living proof.   

A government report just came out (11.23.18) that concluded just the opposite of what the president tweeted.  Based on the collective scientific efforts of hundreds of scientists, the report concludes that the future will be extremely costly for the U.S. if more is not done to check global warming: 

“Climate change will cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century, hitting everything from health to infrastructure, according to a government report . . . .

“Global warming would disproportionately hurt the poor, broadly undermine human health, damage infrastructure, limit the availability of water, alter coastlines, and boost costs in industries from farming, to fisheries and energy production, the report said.”

(from cnbc.com “The Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II”, Nov. 23, 2018, Reuters.)

One can also check out NASA’s website for a concise explanation of global warming and the extensive science behind it.  You can find it at climate.nasa.gov which includes a page devoted to Global Climate Change with sections on “Images of Change” and “Climate Time Machine.” 

Dishonest Donald points to cold weather in New York and gets that smug look of stupefied mediocrity upon his face with which we’ve become all too familiar.  Seasons continue to exist as do vicissitudes of daily weather—as distinct from changes in long-term planetary climatic conditions.

He does not understand that the overwhelming majority of scientists agree that human-caused climate change is real and continuing.  If he knew how to read, he could have learned that no one ever said global warming meant that every spot on earth would be steadily warmer than the day before. 

That’s a figment of Dishonest Donald’s diseased imagination.  Egomania corrupts reason and narcissism corrupts comprehension.

Even if serious reading is a skill beyond his mastery, Dishonest Donald could check out from the public library a book like Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and look at the pictures: the disappearing glaciers at the top of mountains, for example, or what’s happening beyond the Arctic Circle. 

The fact is, Dishonest Donald never seems interested in educating himself where it involves any amount of effort or dispassionate reasoning based upon scientific evidence.  He appears to be wholly incapable of rational and objective thought under any and all such circumstances.

You know, deserts are places on the earth where very little rain falls.  If Dishonest Donald were standing in a desert on one of those rare days where rain occurs, do you care to guess what would he conclude?  He would announce that the definition of a desert as a place with little rain is all wrong!  This is a grown man acting like he has the mind of a six-year-old . . . and not a very bright six-year-old at that.

The warming pattern is derived from many scientific criteria and averages measured over years, decades, centuries, and millennia.  The conclusions are based on a massive amount of evidence collected by thousands of scientists around the world over the last half-century. 

The prediction was never for one single steadily increasingly, ever-worsening heat wave.  No, the prediction states that extremes of weather will worsen, including droughts, storms, floods, and yes, even cold snaps and blizzards.  Scientists understand and can explain the cause-and-effect between global warming and these extreme weather events, including cold weather.

The first time we heard the phrase “once-in-a-hundred year” event (gigantic floods, a storm like Sandy, etc.) it seemed pretty scary but perhaps an anomaly—only now we are hearing such statistical phrasing far more frequently.  The anomaly that was the exception is rapidly becoming the new norm.   

There are sound reasons, well understood by climatologists, why such extreme weather events are continuing to increase in frequency, duration, and severity due to global warming--as recent history amply demonstrates. 

Dishonest Donald’s poles are mixed up.  He has stupidity where intelligence should be, ignorance in place of knowledge, meanness in place of compassion. 

Dishonest Donald has been put together backwards.  He loves to contradict, bully, and bamboozle but nonsense repeated day after day doesn’t cease to be nonsense. 

There are ways to measure carbon dioxide emissions in the air and trace them to their human sources.  What the president suggests defies both logic and the laws of nature, of elemental physics. 

He prefers to indulge the desire to live in an imaginary fantasyland where whatever he says would be believed and no one would ever be allowed to disagree with any of his wretchedly foolish and idiotic pronouncements.  He doesn’t seem to get “Freedom of Speech”, Education, or Science in America.

There is a place called the Great Pacific garbage patch where thousands of tons of plastic are swirling together in an unholy mix: 

“The plastic concentration is estimated to be up to 100 kilograms her square kilometer in the center . . . An estimated 80,000 tons of plastic inhabit the patch, totaling 1.8 trillion pieces . . . Research indicates that the patch is rapidly accumulating.” (from Wikipedia, “Great Pacific garbage patch”.)

This is just one of five such patches or gyres in the Pacific Ocean; there’s another called the North Atlantic garbage patch as well.  Plastic is a human-made product.  Would Dishonest Donald have us believe that the plastic did not emanate from human sources?

Imagine filling a bathtub with water, adding food coloring, watching the color of the water change and then hear someone suggest that the colored water has no relationship to the added food coloring! 

Imagine building mills, mines, and factories near streams, creeks, and rivers and dumping all sorts of horrific waste byproducts into the water and then claiming human activity has nothing to do with the toxicity of the water!  Historically, this is exactly what took place during the Industrial Revolution.

Imagine the millions of pounds of greenhouse gases being poured constantly into the atmosphere and thinking that it has no effect on anything!  This defies both the laws of physics and common sense. 

At a time when America needs an educated, intelligent, and far-seeing visionary in the White House to recognize and address these urgent crises, we get instead a reincarnated wreck from the superstitious past, a man incapable of comprehending even the simplest examples of scientific inquiry and fact-based conclusions. 

He is evolving backwards, it appears.  Next stop, The Twilight Zone.