Some of the things our president and his White House Press Secretary, Sarah Sanders, said earlier this week about climate change and forest fires were stunningly stupid. We didn't write much about it at the time because - well, because the fire hose that is news about this administration kept spewing out other stories, like Michael Cohen's admission that he and Trump continued to work toward getting a Trump Tower in Moscow even during the campaign.
But back to climate change.
The president, again, mistakenly blamed California's Camp wildfires, that grew to be the size of Chicago and killed at least 88, on forest management or the lack thereof.
"We're going to have safe forests," he said just before he came up with this bright idea apparently spun out of jumbled confusion that doubles as his imagination: "You've got to take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forests, it's very important." He posed with California officials in the charred ruins of the town of Paradise, then ruminated that the president of Finland, whom he met on an overseas trip a week earlier, told him about raking the forest floors.
"He called it a forest nation," Trump said, "and they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don't have any problem."
Raking. Did we mention that forests cover about a third of California's 100 million acres? Imagine thousands of people in MAGA hats raking 33 million acres. And by the way, the president of Finland says he told Trump of Finland's efforts to surveil and care for its forests, but raking wasn't mentioned. A funny tweeter posted a doctored photo of the two presidents meeting and the one from Finland was holding a rake across Trump's chest.
Then there was the real stunner - Sarah Sanders and her "not fact-based" nonsense. She stood right there in the White House briefing room in front of God and everybody and said the federal government's latest climate change report - the one that outlines how global warming will cost the nation hundreds of billions in damage - was "not based on facts."
She was defending what Trump said about it: "I've seen it, I've read some of it, and it's fine," Trump had told reporters earlier outside the White House. "I don't believe it."
So Sanders spun some yarn, too.
She claimed that the "radical" report was not "data-driven. it's based on modeling."
It got worse. She said, "You have to look at the fact that this report is based on the most extreme modeled scenario which contradicts long-established trends. Modeling the climate is an extremely complicated science that is never exact."
Fact check 1: The report evaluates a number of scenarios from best- to worst-case.
Fact check 2: Climate models have historically under-predicted the impact of climate change on ice melt, sea level rise, and increases in extreme weather
Fact check 3: Climate models are all about facts. Scientists put the fundamental physical equations of the Earth's climate into a computer model, which is then - in a supercomputer - able to reproduce the circulation of the oceans, the annual cycle of the seasons, and the flows of carbon between the land surface and the atmosphere. Models are the ultimate mathematical if-then equations.
Trump's and Sanders' responses to the new climate report reflect bald, stunning stupidity.
If the Trump administration is going to dismiss the science of computer climate models, let us suggest that they all just keep partying at Mar-a-Lago the next time a hurricane takes aim at Florida.
In the meantime, we'll examine the Trump administration's policy to speed up climate change on Sunday. Watch this space.