The ‘Greatest Hoax’ Strikes Florida
Denying climate change doesn’t stop its devastating effects.
By Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist
Oct. 10, 2018
SNIPPET:
“One of the most preposterous hoaxes in the history of the planet,” scoffed Rush Limbaugh of Palm Beach. Gov. Rick Scott’s administration went so far as to bar some agencies from even using the term “climate change,” according to the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting (Scott denied this).
Myopic Floridians have plenty of company. President Trump dismissed climate change as a hoax “created by and for the Chinese.”
Senator James Inhofe , a
Republican of Oklahoma, “disproved” climate change by taking a snowball onto the Senate floor and noting that it was chilly outside; using similarly rigorous scientific methods
, he wrote a book about climate change called “The Greatest Hoax".
Alas, denying climate change doesn’t actually prevent it. North Carolina passed a law in 2012 prohibiting the use of climate science in certain state planning, yet that didn’t intimidate Hurricane Florence last month. And banning the words “climate change” isn’t helping Florida now.
Some folks will say this isn’t the moment for politics. But don’t we have a responsibility to mitigate the next disaster?
Prof. Michael E. Mann of Penn State told me that Hurricane Michael should be a wake-up call. “As should have Katrina, Irene, Sandy, Harvey, Irma, Florence,” he added wryly. “In each of these storms we can see the impact of climate change: Warmer seas means more energy to intensify these storms, more wind damage, bigger storm surge and more coastal flooding.”
Full article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/opinion/climate-change-hurricane-michael.html