C: Adam Fagen

Spare a thought for poor Donald. He can’t build his wall. He is being out manoeuvred and outplayed by Nancy Pelosi over the Government shutdown and State of the Union address, and out-thought and outnumbered by the public over climate change.

Whereas Trump continues to deny the science on climate change and sow confusion and doubt, the American public now consistently do not believe his lies and obfuscation.

The latest findings by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication reveal that “a large majority of Americans think global warming is happening, outnumbering those who don’t by more than 5 to 1”.

Some 73 per cent of Americans now think that climate change is occurring – an increase of ten percentage points since March 2015. In contrast, only about one in seven Americans think global warming is not happening.

The US public is also becoming more aware that it is caused by human activity. Sixty-two percent of the public now understands that global warming is caused by our activity.

Furthermore, nearly half of the US population say they have personally experienced the effects of global warming, an increase of 15 percentage points since March 2015.

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale program, told the New York Times that the results suggest that climate change has moved out of the realm of the “hypothetical” to the “real” for most Americans.

Dr. Leiserowitz told the paper “People are beginning to understand that climate change is here in the United States, here in my state, in my community, affecting the people and places I care about, and now. This isn’t happening in 50 years, 100 years from now.”

Ironically, the more that Trump tries to dismiss the idea of climate change, the more the media cover it and the public gets concerned. “Every time he talks about climate change he drives more media attention to the exact issue,” Dr. Leiserowitz told the Times.

Take last Sunday: Never one to miss an opportunity to try and stir and confuse the scientific debate on climate change, Trump tweeted on Sunday morning:

“Be careful and try staying in your house. Large parts of the Country are suffering from  tremendous amounts of snow and near record setting cold. Amazing how big this system is. Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”

The ignorance that underpins that statement was seized upon on Twitter, as various commentators laid into the President’s ignorance: Tom Steyer, Founder of NextGenAmerica tweeted:

“Global warming will most obviously be expressed through water. In this case, melting glaciers will mean an end to the rivers flowing out of them and NO WATER for millions of people. Thank you for your stupidity, Mr. Trump.”

Steyer was sharing an indepth and interactive article in the New York Times on how shrinking glaciers will cause a global water shortage.

As the paper noted: “The world’s roughly 150,000 glaciers, not including the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, cover about 200,000 square miles of the earth’s surface. Over the last four decades they’ve lost the equivalent of a layer of ice 70 feet thick.”

It added: “Most of them are getting shorter, too. Some have shrunk to nothing: Smaller glaciers in places like the Rockies and the Andes have disappeared.”

Others weighed in on Trump’s ignorance too. Time Magazine noted that Trump’s denial of the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists comes just 10 days after his own Defense Department released the 22-page report, which assessed “significant vulnerabilities” the military faces from “climate-related events.”

The Washington Post added: “Dear Mr. President, that’s not how global warming works.”

Climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt, responded with a series of tweets, one enclosing a temperature picture of Australia. As parts of the US freeze, America boils.

They say that pictures don’t lie and the temperature picture of Australia shows the country gripped by high temperatures, with records being broken nearly every day, where dogs paws blister on the pavement, bats fall dead out of the trees and fish are being boiled in rivers.

This is the future scientists warned us about and it has arrived.

As an article in the Nation by Ben Ehrenreich recently stated: “Welcome to the future. It feels like it, doesn’t it? Like we have reached the end of something—of the days when the Arctic was not actually in flames, when the permafrost was not a sodden mush, when the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets were not rushing to join the quickly rising seas.”

He adds: “Perhaps we have also, finally, reached the end of the days when we could soothe ourselves with lies, or delusions at least; when we imagined that we were the only masters here, that we could keep taking what we wanted, and that no one would ever have to pay.”

We have reached the time when no one will accept climate lies from Trump anymore. Understanding his lies and ignorance is one thing, but acting on them is another.

Two days ago, Trump celebrated two year’s in office. One of his own “so-called” achievements posted on the White House website was “UNLEASHING AMERICAN ENERGY”, where the President “is rolling back costly and burdensome regulations to unleash America’s incredible energy resources.”

As Oil Change pointed out last week in a major report, we cannot carry on drilling and have a safe climate. Trump is leading us towards climate disaster. And he doesn’t even understand the difference between the climate and the weather.