No… seriously.
Climate scientists tell us that the reason that extreme winter weather can be attributed to global warming is that putting more energy into the system produces greater extremes. So, even though you can’t directly tie the weather on any given day to climate change, the fact that both our summer and winter weather is getting more extreme is an effect of global warming.
But how does that apply to Donald Trump?
Like our weather, our politics is becoming more extreme. The gap between the left and right is growing. People are getting angrier, more entrenched, more divided. My hypothesis: The more energy you feed into a political system, the more extreme the extremes get.
Where is that energy coming from? One of the origins is global warming. I know that sounds like a stretch, but we already have the argument that global warming produced ISIS. And the climate forces that stirred up ISIS are at work everywhere. California is under a catastrophic drought. The East Coast and Gulf Coast are dealing with stronger hurricanes. Florida is under threat of losing coastline. The Midwest is seeing more severe winters.
In a perfect world, the increasingly visible and obvious signs of climate change would spur people on to cut their carbon emissions and save the world. But that isn’t the world we live in. In our world, when populations feel threatened — by almost anything — they become more aggressive toward other people. As the climate heats up, so does the impetus to go to war. Making war on your neighbors may not mitigate the forces that are drying up your water and destroying your agriculture, but it does allow you to take their food so you can live another day.
Donald Trump is nothing if not aggressive. His almost random, but always passionate aggression must look very attractive to people who fear for their future, but don’t have the emotional and mental capacity to look for real solutions. They want someone strong to protect them. The Donald’s strength is as phony as Bernie Madoff’s hedge fund, but it stands out from the pack and for a certain kind of person, it is very comforting.
Look at the kinds of things his supporters say:
His goal is to make American great again; it's on his hat
I support Donald Trump
The crazier the things he says get, the more his supporters love him. There simply isn’t going to be a moment when he says something so vile, so outrageous, so deviant that his support collapses. The rest of the field (except maybe Carson) has it’s origins in the political system, so those candidates have to follow the rules of politics. And the primary rule is, when you say something that offends enough people, you’re toast. But Trump is different. He isn’t a part of the political system, he’s a living avatar for the destructive forces that threaten civilization.
I don’t think he’s going to become president. We’re not quite that far along the global warming and destruction timeline for that. If he manages to get the GOP nomination, we’ll win easily no matter who the Democratic nominee is. And I doubt he’ll get the nomination. His supporters aren’t the most reliable voters, so the race may change a lot when people actually start voting in primaries.
But I still fear what I see in Donald Trump. He is the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse — Pestilence, War, Famine, Death and Trump.