Hot enough for ya?
That used to prompt a smile when I was a kid picking melons and tomatoes in Manzanola. It’s not funny as more than 10,000 people in Europe drop dead from the heat, above the normal amount of heat-related deaths.
Records keepers expect the 1,200 or so normal U.S. heat-related deaths will swell this year, too.
While climbing into a 120-degree car to go home from work is certainly a sharp reminder of what we’ve done to the planet, being hot and uncomfortable is not even the tip of the iceberg of when it comes to the existential threat human-caused global warming has and will bring down on our economy, health and lives.
For flat-earthers like President Donald Trump and Colorado GOP Congressperson Lauren Boebert, who calls all this bad weather, reality will be just as harsh.
These people and their minions are the idiots who say months-long killer heat waves are just problems created by woke thermometers.
The Trump administration’s climate strategy is to lie, deny and disparage.
This is a man so stupid he not only believes that windmills cause cancer, but he thinks it furthers his case of denial by repeating it.
Trump continuously calls climate change “a scam.” His administration has now revoked the EPA’s landmark finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health. It’s been the legal cornerstone of federal climate regulations for the past 17 years.
It’s like repealing the law of gravity because ladders make him nervous. The awkward part for Trump is that reality refuses to sign his nondisclosure agreement.
Scientists, the real ones, those irritating people who insist on measuring things over and over before tweeting about stuff, have spent years studying the connection between climate and human health.
More than 29,000 peer-reviewed studies have examined the issue. More than 5,000 focused on the United States alone. Most were published in just the last five years, the Associated Press reports.
Their conclusions aren’t subtle. Real peer-reviewed scientists are convinced that climate change is already making people sicker, killing more people during extreme heat, worsening air quality, increasing disease risks, and displacing communities because of fires and storms.
And while that’s unnerving in real life during a horror movie, for those who shrug it off and think they’ll just turn up the A/C, there’s a very real cash cost that comes with all this.
The farmers and ranchers who don’t go out of business because of climate change have to find ways to keep their crops and cattle alive during endless heat domes amid increasing droughts. Don’t think for a second you won’t pay the price at the grocery store.
Loving that cheap, cheap house insurance here in Colorado? Oh, just wait.
And your already stupidly unaffordable and increasingly worthless health insurance? The cost of treating climate-change illnesses in increasingly expensive hospitals will make Trump’s disaster trip back to the White House seem like the good-old days.
The administration’s response to all this science and reality is lies, denials and when even Fox News runs the heat-wave death reels, it’s just “la la la, I can’t hear you.”
Meanwhile, back on Earth, scientists continue documenting connections between rising temperatures and illnesses ranging from heat stroke to waterborne disease and mental health problems.
Sure, Boebert. It’s just a scam.
If you’re like her, shrugging and saying, “sucks to be them,” half of the state we live in is covered in combustible growth. And for those who don’t care about life in a burning state and being downwind of endless fires, remember back to the Marshall Fire in December 2021 that burned up 1,084 suburban homes on the plains.
Mid-term elections are coming up, and while all of the whack, sick, dangerous and unfathomable things Trump and his crony Republicans pull out of their orifices every day can’t keep you from looking away, take the time to push for answers about climate change.
Remember that atmospheric physics doesn’t care about wrestling matches on the White House lawn.
Carbon dioxide has never attended a campaign rally, although there’s rarely a shortage of hot air at those things. Heat waves don’t “like” woke memes on social media. Wildfires don’t pick paths based on whether they want to burn through red districts or blue ones.
We aren’t arguing over tax rates, highway funding or whether poor people can use SNAP benefits for Snickers bars.
We’re arguing over whether decades of measurements, thousands of scientific studies, and observable events occurring in real time should be believed. Climate deniers don’t want better science, they want better slogans because slogans poll better.
Trump’s climate change denial and his insistence to step on the gas and make it worse is astonishing.
“It’s akin to insisting that the world is flat or denying that gravity is a thing,” Dr. Howard Frumkin, a physician and professor emeritus of public health at the University of Washington told the Associated Press. President George W. Bush appointed him to the National Center for Environmental Health. “Study after study documents that climate change endangers health, for one simple reason: It’s true.”
Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com
The Republican war against science is mostly about propping up their oil and coal buddies so that profits and plunder can continue.
Feel free to disavow yourself of that First World existence any time.
The hilarious part is that, just to the south, New Mexico manages to fund most of its gibs programs by not choking off its extractive energy industry, because despite being a blue state, they’re not blind to what’s literally keeping their lights on and their state programs functioning.
Summers are getting hotter, for longer, and winters warmer. The questions are not whether this is true, but 1. How much is human caused (the earth has been much hotter before man and seemed to heal itself), 2. Can we reverse the trend, and 3. Are we willing to completely give up the burning of fossil fuels to try to do so.
Even if we could reverse the trend (we may have waited too long), I don’t think we could. Look at the wholesale uproar over an extra $1.50 we are paying for gas and how it has been politicized. It would also take all countries to unite in this effort, which is also impossible. And despite all our efforts so far, we have made no difference yet. People just aren’t willing to go back to living in the stone age. We can’t even face getting our national debt under control much less address a problem of such magnitude. Self-discipline in much of America is long gone. We better focus on dealing with the changes we are seeing rather than using it as a “political football.”
“It’s not funny as more than 10,000 people in Europe drop dead from the heat, above the normal amount of heat-related deaths.”
Let’s not leave out the salient fact that anywhere from 40,000 to 60,000 already die from the heat in Europe during the summer, every single year.
“The farmers and ranchers who don’t go out of business because of climate change have to find ways to keep their crops and cattle alive during endless heat domes amid increasing droughts. Don’t think for a second you won’t pay the price at the grocery store.”
Turns out that running a farm or ranch in a region that already gets less than 18 inches of precipitation a year runs a drought risk. This area wasn’t called “the Great American Desert” by Fremont or “the arid lands” by John Wesley Powell because it was a garden spot.
And considering that most of the farms producing our food are factory farms, which Perry and his team despise (not to mention the ranchers, who’ve been a target of the left for decades for the same purposes of environmentalist moralscolding), this complaint is disingenuous anyway.
“And your already stupidly unaffordable and increasingly worthless health insurance? The cost of treating climate-change illnesses in increasingly expensive hospitals will make Trump’s disaster trip back to the White House seem like the good-old days.”
Looks like this is the new talking point being pushed, since those evil Americans don’t want to give up their air conditioning (which is helping to keep them alive).
“Carbon dioxide has never attended a campaign rally, although there’s rarely a shortage of hot air at those things.”
Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It’s been part of the equilibrium of the atmosphere for millions of years. Plants literally need it to survive, but someone appealing to Science! rather than science isn’t interested in admitting that.
Deny, deny, deny.
Anything to avoid the truth.
Anything to avoid actually dealing with the problem. Which is not going away. No matter how much the Right insists that nothing is changing, despite the facts.
Boiling frogs indeed. And just as stupid.
Yes, Jeff, I realize you can’t refute a single thing I listed. You can’t accept the reality of living in a highly arid region, and your team does everything it can to prevent proper fuel management from taking place in the nation’s public lands to clear out dead trees and underbrush because some EBIL CAPATUHLISSSSSSSSST logging company might benefit from the logging contract, in so this is your cope.
The American West gets plenty of water–to support its natural environment. It doesn’t get enough water to keep parasitic lefty Boomers in high clover while they badmouth the sophisticated engineering systems that keeps their taps flowing and their electricty on.
“Parasitic lefty Boomers”! Boy, you must have worked a while on that one.
Actually, I have listened to, you know, experts, something you show no sign of being, about the future of the climate. The future holds some surprises. For you, anyway.
LOL, yeah, that “I know you are but what am I” retort and appeal to authority.
I’m highly confident that the arid west will continue to be just that, so no surprises there. Hilarious that you actually think a dedicated study of the region’s natural history eludes anyone other than yourself. Absolute nuclear-grade solipsism from you, as usual.
I’m so tired of people denying science at the same time they believe that a 2,000 year-old book should be taken literally. I worked with researchers. I submitted grants for Anschutz and CU Denver. These people are as dedicated as it comes to testing and retesting, to the peer review process, to selecting the correct statistical test to correctly measure their data. It’s mind boggling that people who like getting grandpa his much needed stent, or people who regularly take medication would buy assertions that the same scientific method has determined that we are causing holes in the Ozone layer and that weather patterns are changing more rapidly than ever before. It’s not just fossil fuels. It’s the way we treat the earth, the air, and the water. It’s also using too much plastic. It’s using rivers as sewers. It’s using farming methods that are obsolete. We use way too much water to produce our food. Using science, the Netherlands, yes, the Netherlands is a top global leader in agricultural technology and controlled-environment agriculture. Because they believe in innovation and science they can grow tomatoes using up to 90% less water. If we believe in science because of medical advances or because of space travel or because of advances in automobiles or just plain conveniences that we take for granted, we must accept science – all science even when it’s inconvenient!
“I’m so tired of people denying science at the same time they believe that a 2,000 year-old book should be taken literally.”
Strawman.
“Because they believe in innovation and science they can grow tomatoes using up to 90% less water.”
Most western agriculture grows alfalfa, not vegetables. Hilarious how this seems to be a particular bugaboo of yours.
“If we believe in science”
Science is supposed to be a practice of ongoing study and deliberation, not a religion run by high priests.
The planet may be warming up but there isn’t scientific proof that humans are causing it. It very well could be a cycle or small change in the earth’s orbit between the earth and the sun. We’ve had ice ages before and warming periods in earth’s history long before humans existed. The best way to convince someone that something is true is by feeding them small parts until they incorrectly assume that something is absolutely true. To me, the climate scare is the work of propaganda from the Chinese government to weaken and profit from the United States and Europe. China builds hundreds of coal powered power plants every year and sells the bulk of all solar panels. They have no concern about implementing alternative energy to save anything. Yet the folks like this author are so obsessed with the US doing something that they ignore and remain silent on the biggest polluting countries in the world.
Yes, it’s all a Commie plot.
Actually, there’s plenty of proof of human activity causing climate change. But that would require actual, you know, learning…
Since human activity causes climate change, it seems the logical conclusion is to turn deep blue cities into quiet neighborhoods for about 1,000 years, since fewer people = less activity = the climate remains the same forever, as you think it should.