Photo Credit of By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Donald Trump), via Wikimedia Commons
If supporting neo-nazis and the KKK on national television wasn’t enough for the week, The President of the United States is back at it again to remind us of how tone deaf and ignorant he is on almost everything. The Trump administration has now decided to disband the Advisory Committee for Sustained National Climate Assessment by refusing to renew their charter that expired on Sunday.
This Committee, since its inception, has worked to provide a detailed document known as the National Climate Assessment that discusses the impacts of climate change on America in the present and in the future. While they will be providing their 2018 report, it will be their last report for as long Trump is in office.
Now, this shouldn’t come as any surprise. Trump recently pulled out of the Paris Agreement and eliminated environment-friendly regulations on infrastructure. He seems to run on his own reasoning and doesn’t believe rising temperatures are a real, foreseeable threat to humanity and the planet that future generations will inherit. Or perhaps we give him too much credit for the said reasoning and intellect, and his refusal to commit to the cause may just stem from greed and apathy and a desire to not work too hard. Because climate change isn’t a contentious argument, not in 2017. It is very much happening, as evidenced by the unanimous support from the leading scientific minds of the world.
The report from the Advisory Committee for Sustained National Climate Assessment itself claims that the world temperature has been rising rapidly since 1980, and the earth is the warmest it has been in almost 1500 years. The Committee, in fact, already feared a negative reaction from the Trump Administration, who still hold the belief that human contribution to climate change is still “uncertain,” and by doing so, Trump discredits almost a century’s worth of scientific thought and discovery. Their fears came to fruition on Sunday, when Donald Trump decided that the committee needed to be no more.
Richard Moss, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences, had some cutting words on this matter, highlighting how the Trump Administration and their policies will impact the future. “We’re going to be running huge risks here [with the disbanding of the Committee] and possibly end up hurting the next generation’s economic prospects.”
Ed Murray, the mayor of Seattle, summed everything up perfectly. “[It is] an example of the President stepping away from reality.”
