The biggest issue we're going to have is that at some point someone else will be in charge, and the science will resume, but there will be a big hole in the data, because this current administration is no longer funding the collection of critical data for climate models. We won't even really feel the effects of this for probably a decade or more, when the models finally see the effects of the lack of data.
In 2028, there will be strong indicators of continued climate change. But denialists will be able to say "well we can't say for sure, there's this huge gap in data from 2016-2024, we need to have at least 16 years of solid data in order to say for sure."
Climate scientists seem pretty sure already that climate change is happening. In 2028 when the effects should be even more obvious do you think there will still be denialists? There's reason to believe the bottom third of Florida will be underwater by 2030 [0], if a significant fraction of the US is still denying it by then it might be time to give up hope in our nation's continued presence on Earth.
But I think a bigger issue is that we're going to spend 4-8 years making little progress actually fixing climate change. Any changes we do have greater impact the earlier we do them. It was a smoldering fire in a wastepaper basket 30 years ago. Now one bedroom is on fire. We're going to spend another 2-6 years doing nothing while the fire continues to spread. Hopefully we'll still be able to put it out once we get an adult into office.
Up until three years ago there was "an adult in office" and not all that much was actually being done. Sure, more than now, but it's not like they had plans for shutting down all coal plants or something of the sort
Not to mention the loss of experience and knowledge as people in the affected programs move on to other, potentially more stable, and potentially more lucrative, employment.
Budgets are being slashed across the admin, but NOAA is prime example. They've said multiple times they can no longer meet all of their priorities because of the lack of budget. It came to head during the government shutdown, when they simply stopped doing any work for a month.
If we discover how to read historic climate data from carbon atoms, like we do with radioactive decay, do you see all the money we spent so far as a waste?
So bizarre. The US defense department even says that climate change is one of the largest threats to US security. So, basically the Trump administration is pure politics.
> So, basically the Trump administration is pure politics.
Every administration's positions and policies reflect their politics, and their donor base. This one isn't different in that way.
This particular administration's positions represent the interests of the fossil fuel extraction industry, whether via the appointment of fossil fuel industry executives to positions of authority over environmental policy, or in the leniency by the administration toward particular authoritarian petro states like Saudi Arabia and Russia.
No. If the system had been different, the candidates would have adopted a different strategy and you can't predict the outcome. The current system doesn't incentivize republicans from California to go vote like it doesn't for democrats from Alabama.
>I want New York City and Los Angeles to select the president of the United States for the far foreseeable future.
No thanks though. You can argue first past the post, or ranked, or even if the division of EC votes always makes sense. But these are the rules we have - for good reason.
Hillary Clinton didn't get 3 million more votes, she got 74 fewer.
The US election system is based off a binary choice, many people who ended up voting for Trump did so for some of his stated positions without regard to the others. As such being elected to president isn't any sort of endorsement of all their policy positions.
This is mostly unrelated to the point of the article, but I noticed that Trump in this article is repeatedly referred to as "Mr. Trump". Only once as "President Trump." This seems a little bit out of the ordinary to me. I can't recall Obama ever being called "Mr. Obama".
This isn't a criticism at all - but simply piqued my curiosity. Is there a reason for this? My only assumption is it's meant to be a minor indicator of the author's sentiment regarding Trump. Or is it just common NY Times style?
EDIT: It appears it's simply a well document common style decision. I should have looked it up before posting!
Searches for "Mr. Obama" bring up plenty of results, but more to the point it's a fairly common journalistic practice to use President Foo for the first mention and Mr. Foo for subsequent mentions. (Non-presidents usually get Mr. Foo and then just Foo.)
> I’m not sure whether one of my long-ago predecessors got similar complaints about The Times’s references to “Mr. Lincoln.” But I can assure readers that we have been consistent for many years in how we refer to an incumbent president: It’s “President Trump” (or President Obama, or President Bush) on first reference, and “Mr. Trump” or “the president” (lowercase) thereafter.
The first six paragraphs of personal gripes, opinions, and hyperbole, for a start.
If the story started and ended with hard facts, interpretation, and interview, it would be less painful to read and more effective in conveying the point.
The way it's written, I'd be surprised if a healthy 20% of readers would reach the actual news: that the horizon for the government's first-party predictions of climate change is being shortened to about twenty years rather than about eighty. That would be something specific that you could make up your own mind about, instead of adopting the tedious framing, and something you could take up with your representatives and your community.
Discrediting the article’s tone is easier than attacking its conclusions, but that’s not how we have a productive discussion, and I hope we can agree it’s not useful.
The Nytimes refers to nearly all people using personal, not professional, titles when their professional title is obvious from context or already previously stated in the article.
The "Mr." stuff is just a quirk of the NY Times' opinionated editorial style; they also forego the Oxford comma despite that being a perpetual source of confusion.
> But. The earth has a tendency to regulate itself and take care of itself. It will wipe out humanity if it needs to and then time will continue.
There is no evidence that the Earth is sentient and assigning needs and wants to it is fallacious. Geological records show that the Earth has gone through several eras where life flourished followed by major extinction events. If we want to achieve long term stability for the human civilization, we need to achieve the power to control the climate and transform landscapes. Of course, we need to do it judiciously; but not developing such capabilities is shooting ourselves in the foot in the long run.
Civilization as we have known it is at risk. I guess some people are either too ignorant to understand or are not invested enough in their progenies futures. Either way, fun times ahead.
