Imagine being so nonchalant about the fate of every present and future American that you are willing to not just both sides your way right over the top of the near-universal scientific consensus on the global climate crisis, but also defend your theory that maybe climate change is "not" human-related with this string of dismissive hokum-laced gibberish: "You know, I think it's weather patterns, frankly. And you know, and they change, as I said. It rained yesterday, it's a nice pretty day today. So the climate does change in short increments and in long increments."
That is the nation's actual, honest-to-Jeebus Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue telling CNN interviewer Vanessa Yurkevich that, Well golly gee, maybe it's the massive worldwide dumping of carbon into the atmosphere causing global temperatures to soar and natural disasters to get worse, but it could also be "weather patterns, frankly." Because, as the actual we're-all-going-to-die Secretary of Agriculture, he wonders if them climate-scientist types have taken into account that it rains some days and doesn't on others.
Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue's designated day job is to protect the nation's, well, agriculture: the farmers, the farmland, the ability of the United States to feed itself without the occasional bouts of mass starvation that plague other parts of the world. A changing climate is going to screw the American food supply. A difference of a few degrees one way or another alters what crops can be grown in what places; altered atmospheric currents may shift rainfall patterns not for a season, but for millennia. There are limits on how much sheer agricultural inventiveness can mitigate those new conditions, and the limits grow harder with every tenth of a degree of difference that each year's continued policy ambivalence has now made inevitable.
This is a catastrophe that can be seen from many miles off, and has been, and one of the appointees most responsible for developing a strategy to prevent future Americans from dying outright is still puttering around in his brain with Weather, how does it work?
There's not much to be said here. Again, it is not just that Republicanism and conservatism have devolved into reflexively anti-science, anti-expert posturing on every front, but that it is based on ... nothing at all. Perdue has no curiosity about the matter, no interest in crafting a plausible or even nonridiculous defense of his contrarianism; the party doctrine is that perhaps climate change is not "real," and nothing more is needed.
Yet another conspiracy theory might be tossed out about some supposed secret forces working behind the scenes to make every citizen and government believe an untrue thing; some blog post by a mysterious crackpot might be trotted out as evidence that all the world's area experts, collectively, may have been too stupid to ever consider an alternate theory that the amateur thought up last night, on the toilet; someone might pop up with a God will sort it out waving of the hands. But none of it is needed. One can be picked at random, discarded, reworked, discarded again, or what have you, and it will not interrupt, in the slightest, the predetermined doctrine of Because the party said so. Or, cutting closer to the core, Because the donors said so.
This is an appointed secretary of agriculture dismissing all of science with no more than a shrugging Eh, maybe it's just weather. And if he left the office tomorrow, the party could find a thousand others to take his place, each of whom could be assured to be just as devoted in their enforced incuriosity. It is as if an entire party has gotten dumber on principle, just to stick it to the book-learners good and hard and damn tomorrow.