{UAH} Donald Trump Mistook Weather for Climate Again
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4:48 AM |
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Donald Trump Mistook Weather for Climate Again
On Monday night, President Trump decided to take on climate change. We haven't heard from him on the subject in while—lucky us—but, as with the hurricanes he exclaimed uselessly about, ("Hurricane looks like largest ever recorded in the Atlantic!"), he can't ignore a weather record. The superlative—the most, biggest, lowest, greatest, top, or best—is his favorite and possibly only purview.
"In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can't last outside even for minutes," he tweeted. "What the hell is going on with Global Waming [sic]? Please come back fast, we need you!"
Meteorologists are predicting that temperatures in the Midwest will drop to a potentially murderous negative 30 degrees Fahrenheit, and, with windchill, possibly go as low as negative 60 degrees on Wednesday. So he correctly parroted someone else's data for once. But how he manages to say something as genuinely scary as, "People can't last outside even for minutes," and make it sound like a brag is something science has not yet cracked. The community is too busy trying to keep bad ideas like this one from maintaining a stranglehold on public discourse.
The tweet is one of his lazier ones, fired off between exuberant praise for Fox & Friends's exuberant praise for him and the questionable tactic of going after someone else's Vietnam record. The point of this kind of dispatch from Trump's id has become somewhat rote by now. It's bait, sure to enrage anyone who considers climate change an existential threat, in the same way you'd be pissed as a uniformed stranger taunted your family while preparing to raze your village.
At least this one is straightforward. The intent, the inspiration for it, and where the information could have come from are clear enough. Often when he shouts about things he doesn't understand, what comes out is cryptic claims that send fact checkers, those damned souls tasked with taping together the jumble into a sort of Franken-thought so it might mean something, are sent racing down a trail that always ends at a cliff. Like, why he's fixated on human traffickers making a left turn—not a right turn—in the desert with their blindfolded women, for example, or the claim that water being diverted into the Pacific instead of being used to fight wildfires. Climate-change denial, on the other hand, is a well-trod road to nowhere.
This short story ends how you knew it would: The opposite of what Trump's tweet implies is closer to the truth. Climate change has been offered as the cause of a breakdown in weather patterns at the poles, which releases frigid air from over there, thus causing the low temperatures in the Midwest. The explanation is more complicated than that of course, and you should read about the how's and why's from the science section. You can also read about how winters are potentially getting shorter, weather more severe, and close encounters with a polar vortex more common. All the information is readily available, just don't count on the president trying to find it. He's not getting any wamer. He's cod and getting codder.
"If I'm right, and I'm pretty sure I am," writes Dr. Epstein, Trump is capable of only a minimal level of analytical or critical thinking." (Photo: DonkeyHotey/flickr/cc)
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