Climate change isn't a hoax, but most of what President Trump says about it and the Paris climate agreement is.
The goal of the 2015 Paris agreement is to prevent the Earth from heating up by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit since the start of the industrial age.
Given that the world already has warmed about 2 degrees since the age of mechanization began, the nearly worldwide agreement by 195 countries to make voluntary reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases released by their manufacturing is more about preventing an additional 1.6 degrees of warming.
Carbon dioxide is an important heat-trapping gas. It combines with other gases to form a kind of greenhouse effect in our atmosphere. As the atmospheric CO2 builds up (a product not only of the exhales of billions of people on the Earth, but also the burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal to power our lives), it traps and holds the heat reflected off the Earth from the sun. In other words, the greenhouse effect of the built-up carbon acts as a multiplier for the sun's heat.
Scientists have developed ways to measure the build-up of CO2 in our atmosphere and they track its steady climb at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. In 2005, the measure was 378.21 parts per million. In April 2017, it was 406.17 ppm. Those scientists also have determined that 1950 was the year when atmospheric CO2 cycles of increase began consistently spiking and breaking records.
Similarly, scientists track the temperatures all over the earth and use those temperatures to develop a yearly Earth temperature for the planet. That, too, is going up and up. Our planet has had 16 record-breaking hottest years since 2000.
Think about that. Every year of the past 16 years was record-breaking warm, with 2016 being the hottest year yet.
This isn't a theory. It's a fact that 97 percent of scientists in the world agree on.
Scientists like to measure things, and they've also documented a 6.7-inch rise in global sea levels over the last century. The rate of that rise has doubled in the last decade.
Additionally, the acidity of the world's oceans has increased by 30 percent.
Extreme weather, another hallmark of climate change, has risen as well. Since 1980, the U.S. alone sustained 203 weather and climate disasters with overall damage costs reaching or exceeding $1 billion. The cumulative costs for those 203 events exceed $1.1 trillion.
Once again, the year 2016 scored a record (second highest) with 15 weather and climate events, each with losses exceeding
$1 billion. Those events included drought, wildfire, four inland floods, eight severe storm events and a hurricane. The year 2011 holds the No. 1 highest record, with 16 events - including the April tornado outbreak that ravaged our region. Overall, the Southeast took the bulk of the recent 16 years' of record weather events.
It would seem the only "hoax" perpetrated on us is our president and the far too many members of his Republican party who are more interested in denying science than in problem solving.
In announcing Thursday that the U.S. will not honor its voluntary commitments in the Paris climate treaty, Trump misled the public over and over.
He said the U.S. was treated unfairly. Each country set its own voluntary carbon reduction goal, so how is that unfair? Further, on a per capita basis, the U.S. in 2015 produced more than twice the carbon dioxide emissions of China and eight times more than India.
He said "we're getting out, but we will start to negotiate" and see if we can make a deal that's fair. He can change the U.S. commitments made by President Barack Obama, but world leaders are making it clear there is no interest in renegotiating the entire agreement.
He said China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants and India can double its coal production, but we can't build more. That's just false.
The agreement is nonbinding - a fact that any reader can find and surely Trump's advisers told him. What's more, China announced in January that it was canceling its plans to build 103 coal plants, and India has coal plants sitting idle because solar power prices have fallen so low that coal plants now are too expensive to build and put to use even there.
Trump said the other countries were not paying their share.
Again false. What's more, the 43 countries that have pledged money to the Green Climate Fund (to help the other poorer countries bring down carbon emissions) have pledged $10.13 billion collectively. The U.S. pledged $3 billion and now it is us who will not make good on the bulk of our pledge.
Meanwhile, record and near-record warm temperatures were recorded across the eastern U.S., resulting in the 11th warmest April since national records began in 1895, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Arctic sea ice was 6.9 percent below the 1981-2010 average, tying April 2016 for the smallest April sea ice measure since satellite records began in 1979. And Antarctic sea ice was 18.2 percent below average - the second smallest April measure on record.
If Trump and the GOP faithfuls doubt this science, we wonder what science they do trust. Do they believe medical science? Do they believe reproductive science?
Oh - but of course. They must believe political science.