4 Years Of Accelerating Climate Disaster For US & World, And An "Administration" That Does Not Care

[hatrack]

EDIT

In the U.S., the last four years have brought one climate-fueled disaster after another. Trump’s first year in office, 2017, was marked by the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Harvey on the Texas coast and hurricanes Irma and Maria in Puerto Rico. All three storms rank among the five costliest storms in U.S. history, and studies have suggested that they were all influenced, to some extent, by climate change.

On the opposite side of the country, raging wildfires have plagued Western states each year Trump has been in office. California’s fires alone burned more than 4 million acres in 2020, the largest area ever recorded and more than double the previous record. The August Complex Fire, which raged in and around the Mendocino National Forest in Northern California this summer, was the largest in the state’s known history and the first on record to burn more than a million acres, earning it the moniker “gigafire.”

The previous record for California’s largest fire was also set under Trump’s watch, in 2018. Trump has repeatedly pinned the blame for worsening wildfires on bad forest management. Wildfires are complex disasters, and it’s true that certain forest management practices can increase the severity of a blaze. But scientists emphasize that rising temperatures and drought are making Western wildfires bigger and more destructive. In fact, research suggests that climate change has already been influencing the Western fire season for decades.

EDIT

As historic climate events make headlines around the world, scientists are also rapidly advancing their understanding of climate change. The same disasters that have rocked the nation the last four years are getting easier to link to global warming. Scientists have made strides in a field known as attribution science, a type of research that investigates the extent to which climate change has influenced an individual weather event, like a hurricane or a heat wave. Over the last few years, scientists have made particular advancements in the speed at which they’re able to conduct these studies. In years past, attribution studies could take months to complete. Now, scientists are able to conduct them almost in real time (Climatewire, July 19, 2019). As attribution science has advanced, researchers are discovering that certain climate events would never have happened at all in a world without human-caused warming.

EDIT

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-and-research-raced-forward-as-trump-turned-his-back/

[NRaleighLiberal]

1. thanks so much for your posts on the climate tonight - helps with the "atmosphere"

[BigmanPigman]

2. Is this the main issue for the increase in the youth turnout?

[hatrack]

3. I think it's certainly a slice of it - coming of age is hard enough . .

Doing so with full knowledge of what's in store is something I can't even imagine at my age.

This is particularly true considering how much better the scientists are at predicting and attributing what's happening to what we're doing compared to even ten years ago.