To The Trump Team, Climate Change Is "Benefitting" Mankind

Under the Trump administration, the Environmental
Protection Agency isn't protecting anything, 
except maybe the fossil fuel industry. 

 In the Trump world, up is down, down is up and everything is half ass backwards. 

E&E News By Politico has the deets:

"President Trump has long rejected climate science.

Now, his administration is grappling with how to assemble a body of federal climate research to show a warming world is benefitting humanity. The claims would be highly misleading and ignore decades of scientific research that shows climate change will have increasingly dire effects."

As I previously reported, the Trump administration has scrubbed climate information from a variety of web sites and fired numerous climate scientists. 

Also, as I have noted before, the Trumpers want to remove something called an endangerment finding from the EPA.  That document requires the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

As E&E News reports, legal experts think the federal courts would frown on getting rid of that endangerment finding. The Supreme Court has rejected three challenges to the endangerment finding. 

To get around that, Trump and the EPA would just come up with a new document, one that falsely says that climate change is a bunch of hooey,  

They could do that by finding "experts" who falsely claim that climate change is not a biggie.  Or they can pick apart existing U.S. and international climate reports, offering dubious counter arguments to those reports.  

And they could produce a new National Climate Assessment written by unqualified Trump minions and fossil fuel industry hacks. 

Of course, these morons would be up against a continued onslaught of new reports and findings describing why climate change is bad. I mean, every time I turn around, there's some new study that says climate change will worsen X, Y and Z.  

I never hear any serious person say climate change is going to create more joy, happiness, rainbows and puppy dogs.  But, that doesn't matter. All the climate deniers have to do is go before a Trump-appointed "judge" who's a total suck up to Dear Leader. From there, all bets are off. Such a "judge" could well go along with the Trump fantasy narrative. 

That fantasy narrative has already taken shape. 

David Legates, who was briefly a NOAA mucky muck during the first Trump administration, has these revisionist thoughts on greenhouse gases. 

"I'm pretty certain that what we're going to conclude from what we know now is that carbon dioxide is not an evil gas......Rather, it's a gas beneficial to life on Earth. It'll increase temperatures slightly, and warmer temperatures are certainly better than colder temperatures."

Spoken like a dude who's sick of winter where he lives but has no idea how science works.  

So let's do Science 101 for this guy. 

Fine, it's true, we need carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, since as those of you who went through Grade School science know, plants need CO2 to survive. Since us humans need plants to survive, a certain amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is truly a good thing.

Also, it's basic physics that if you increase CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere, you're going to increase the temperature of said atmosphere. 

Teasing apart Legate's words, it appears he also thinks climate change is good because fewer people would die of cold weather. Which might actually be true. But what about all the extra people that keep dying of heat related causes because heat waves keep getting hotter?

I guess they don't count. 

As you'd expect, serious climate scientists are appalled by all this.  E&E News got this quote from the ever-reliable (and smart and relatable) climate scientist Michael Mann:

"What the Trump administration is trying to do amounts to nothing more than trying to pollute the process with ideologically-motivated antiscoience.,....It means the U.S. federal government is now at war with humanity."

We know, of course, despite any criticism, the Trump gang will soldier on. 

While climate change keeps biting us "little people" in the ass, our billionaire overlords can rest easy, protecting in their little cocoons as they keep raking in blood money from the fossil fuel industry.