The last thing the world needs are more 3 AM Trump tweets. But Joe Romm at Climate Progress nevertheless poses an excellent rhetorical question: “Why didn’t Trump tweet that Tuesday’s warmth crushed the D.C. record by 9°F?” Why, indeed, since The Donald™has tweeted attacks on climate science more than 30 times in the past five years.
Of course, cold U.S. temperatures in the winter are no evidence against global climate change, as we’ve reported repeatedly — just as one isolated record heat wave doesn’t provide significant evidence for climate change.
But that’s the point. The scientific evidence for long-term human-caused global warming is overwhelming and unimpeachable.
Rational people might think that the documented vulnerability to sea level rise of Trump’s oceanfront club at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach would be enough to persuade the guy to change his tune.
The conservatively estimated wrecking of a half-billion dollars of property values that a one foot rise in sea level—much less a meter—would cause at Palm Beach has certainly given some locals pause:
That worries Robin Bernstein, a Mar-a-Lago member who’s president of an insurance brokerage. The barrier island that the town sits on is only two blocks wide where she lives. “So you can imagine, three feet of water-level change would severely impact us,” she says. Yet Bernstein, a Republican, says she’s not bothered by Trump’s stated position on climate change. “What I trust in Donald Trump is that he will look at all sides of an issue,” she says. “He will surround himself with the best and the brightest people and find ways to come up with creative solutions to combat today’s and tomorrow’s problems.”
Bernstein is proof that you don’t have to look like an extra from the cast of Deliverance to be a chump for Trump. Many of the several fossil fuel fans who have joined or are likely to join the pr*sident’s cabinet and other high positions in his regime have weasel-worded their way out of their past stances dinging climate science. But the “creative solutions” they can be counted on to support—like wrecking the Environmental Protection Agency and killing limits on greenhouse gas emissions—are right in line with past Twitter ravings of their boss.