Sohn: Speak out now against Trump's anti-Earth cabinet

The temperatures are rising - on earth and in Washington, D.C.

For the third consecutive year, our Earth shattered high-temperature records. Last year was Earth's hottest year on record. And before, 2015 was the hottest. And before that, 2014 had shattered the record.

Weather and climate experts say the string of three consecutive record-breaking years was another "first" in recorded weather history.

Most experts believe this will get worse before it gets better - if it is allowed to get better. We must change our ways to slow this serious and sure threat to our natural world and human civilization, and that means we need leaders who are willing to lead with science, not ignore science.

In 2016, New York City averaged 57.2 degrees - 2.2 degrees above normal. Ada, Okla., averaged 63.4 degrees, or 2.1 degrees above normal. Albany, Ga., had an average temp of 69.2 degrees - almost 70, or 3 degrees above normal.

Albertville, Ala., saw an average temperature increase of 5.1 degrees above normal. Allentown, Pa. was 3.6 degrees up; Destin, Fla., 3.9. Likewise up went Atlanta: 3.3 degrees; Chattanooga, 3.2 degrees; Charlotte, 3.1; Seattle, 2.4; Sacramento, 3.5; Anchorage, 4.4; New Orleans, 2.3.

You get the idea.

The temperatures were calculated from a database of more than 5,000 cities provided by AccuWeather. Some 90 percent of those cities recorded annual mean temperatures higher than normal.

In his confirmation hearings this week, Scott Pruitt, president-elect Donald Trump's nominee to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, went out on a limb and declined to mimic Trump who has said he thinks climate change "is a hoax."

"I do not believe that climate change is a hoax," Pruitt told senators. But he wouldn't say what causes it. And he wouldn't say Trump is wrong, though an overwhelming number of scientists say there's no doubt that human activity - particularly the burning of fossil fuels - is responsible for the majority of the warming since 1950.

But of course asking if he or anyone believes this is a hoax sets a ridiculously low bar. And by the way, no senator followed up to ask: Well, if you don't think it's a 'hoax,' what do you think it is? Is it the greatest threat we've ever seen? Is it a lie? That answer would have been important.

Set the bar higher still. Ask Pruitt - and Exxon executive Rex Tillerson who may be our next secretary of state, or Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., who seems destined to lead the Department of Interior - what they plan to do about it.

In the absence of that all-important question, look at their records.

As attorney general in Oklahoma, Pruitt sued EPA 13 times trying to block every concrete step the agency has taken to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Yet he told the senators in charge of confirming him: "I believe the EPA has a very important role to perform in regulating CO2." What is that role? To regulate a freer release of CO2 to help Oklahoma's fracking industry drill faster?

Pruitt would not be just the fox guarding the hen house. He would be the fox sent there to destroy the hen house.

The same is true for many of the Trump nominees.

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry didn't know exactly what it was Trump had offered him when he said yes to becoming the head of the Department of Energy (the same agency Perry couldn't remember when in a presidential primary debate he tried to tick off the three agencies he would eliminate). When he accepted Trump's offer, Perry believed he was taking on a role as global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry which he has long championed, according to The New York Times. Now, whoops - he's learned that the DOE is an agency with a $30 billion budget devoted to maintaining, refurbishing and keeping safe the nation's nuclear stockpile; thwarting nuclear proliferation; cleaning up and rebuilding an aging array of nuclear production facilities, and overseeing our government's national science laboratories like Oak Ridge.

Perry, who studied animal husbandry and led cheers at Texas A&M University before entering politics, acknowledged that he has "a long learning curve." His predecessors include a Stanford researcher who won the Nobel Prize for physics and another researcher who directed the linear accelerator at MIT's Laboratory for Nuclear Science and chaired MIT's physics department.

There isn't much time left. Our senators will be voting on all or some of these folks possibly in just a matter of hours.

More than 55 Tennessee scientists, engineers and health professionals recently sent a letter to Tennessee's senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker asking them to oppose Pruitt, in particular, because, "We need an EPA administrator who will adhere to the science and preserve these protections rather than erode them to the benefit of industry."

It's important for all of us to add our voices as well.