When Donald Trump went to California amid one of the worst fire seasons in history, he continued to deny the totally obvious: man-made climate change is causing havoc across the globe.
In the American West drought and unprecedented heat have caused the entire west coast to burn, from California to Washington state. Half a million people were evacuated from their homes in Oregon, where it's usually quite wet. Dozens of people have died since August, and smoke from the fires spread across the entire northern half of the United States, dimming the sun in Minnesota, New York and Washington, DC.
The Atlantic hurricane season, barely half hover, is in full force. Louisiana has already been hammered by two hurricanes that dumped several feet of rain. Almost a million people lost power in Hurricane Laura, and less than a month later Hurricane Sally dumped more rain and hundreds of thousands of people lost power in Florida and Mississippi.
Five hurricanes are spinning up in the Atlantic, all at once, only the second time this has ever happened. Cyclone Ianos is hitting Greece today, something which almost never happens.
Why are there so many hurricanes and cyclones? Climate change has heated the oceans up, and the hotter the water gets, the more hurricanes form. It's just physics.
A 42-square mile chunk of the Greenland ice cap just broke off into the ocean, after a record year of melting in 2019. Arctic sea ice extent dropped precipitously in the last 40 years, and the pace of decline in 2020 is the fastest ever. This year is the second lowest on record (2012 holds the record).
The melting of the Greenland ice cap is a major contributor to sea level rise, which is causing constant flooding throughout Florida and other coastal states, and making storm surge during hurricanes and even normal storms expensive disasters, eroding beaches and destroying property values.
All of this is happening, and yet Trump and his cronies still pretend nothing is wrong.
Even if you believe that some natural process caused climate change, you cannot deny that by continuing to pump carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, and by cutting down forests for farming and logging, we are making it that much worse. If you're standing on a tree limb and you hear it cracking, you don't jump up and down on it.
We are simply making the world uninhabitable. Temperatures in Death Valley reached 130 degrees in August, and similarly high temperatures have been recorded in Kuwait and Pakistan. How long can people continue living in these places?
People in Louisiana are getting hammered by hurricanes about once a month during the season. How long before insurance companies say enough is enough, and refuse to cover homes along the Gulf Coast?
The exodus from California is already starting, with people heading for other states across the west, including Utah, Idaho and Texas.
This may be for the best. In many states Republicans have gerrymandered congressional districts to take an outsized majority of seats, even though they receive a minority or slight majority of the vote total. An influx of a relatively small number of moderate voters to the right districts could swing currently Republican states into the Democratic column.
Human-caused climate change is driving thousands of species to extinction. If there is such a thing as karma, Republican politicians will be its next victims.
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