SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — With the smell of California wildfires in the air, President Donald Trump on Monday ignored the scientific consensus that climate change is playing a central role in historic West Coast infernos and renewed his claim that poor forest management is mostly to blame.
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Trump’s Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, in his own speech on Monday said the destruction and mounting death toll across California, Oregon and Washington require stronger presidential leadership and labeled Trump a “climate arsonist.”
Trump traveled to Northern California to be briefed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state and federal officials. At one point, state Natural Resources Agency Secretary Wade Crowfoot urged the president to “recognize the changing climate and what it means to our forests.”
“If we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians,” Crowfoot added.
Trump responded, “It will start getting cooler, just you watch.”
Crowfoot politely pushed back that he wished the science agreed with the president. Trump countered, “I don’t think science knows, actually.”
Calif. Sec. for Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot: "We want to work with you to really recognize the changing climate…"
Trump: "It'll start getting cooler. You just watch."
Crowfoot: "I wish science agreed with you."
Trump: "Well, I don't think science knows actually." pic.twitter.com/U6WKqFD11r
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) September 14, 2020
That striking moment came on a day of dueling campaign events, with Trump and Biden dramatically contrasting their outlooks on climate change —and the impact it has had on the record-setting fires ravaging the West Coast.
Biden lashed at Trump, saying the moment requires “leadership, not scapegoating” and that “it’s clear we are not safe in Donald Trump’s America.”
“This is another crisis, another crisis he won’t take responsibility for,” Biden said. He said that if voters give “a climate denier” another four years in the White House, “why would we be surprised that we have more of America ablaze?”
Trump, who was briefed during a stop near Sacramento before a campaign visit to Phoenix, had been mostly quiet as the catastrophe on the West Coast has unfolded over the past few weeks. He tweeted appreciation of firefighters and emergency responders on Friday, the first public comments he had made in weeks about the fires that have killed dozens, burned millions of acres and forced thousands from their homes.
The president arrived at at Sacramento McClellan Airport to the powerful scent of smoke from the fires burning some 90 miles away.
He contended anew that Democratic state leaders are to blame for failing to rake leaves and clear dead timber from forest floors.
“When you have years of leaves, dried leaves on the ground, it just sets it up,” Trump said. “It’s really a fuel for a fire. So they have to do something about it.”
University of Colorado fire scientist Jennifer Balch called Trump’s deflecting blame on forest managers “infuriating.”
“It’s often hard to know what Trump means,” Balch added. “If by forest management he means clear-cutting, that’s absolutely the wrong solution to this problem. … There’s no way we’re going to log our way out of this fire problem.”
Biden, who gave his climate speech in Delaware on Monday, released a $2 trillion plan in July to boost investment in clean energy and stop all climate-damaging emissions from U.S. power plants by 2035.
But as the wildfires rage, some climate activists have expressed frustration that Biden has not been more forceful on the issue. He has not embraced, for instance, some of the most progressive elements of the Green New Deal.
To that end, Biden in his address did not wade into political and policy disagreements among Democrats, progressive activists and even some Republicans who acknowledge the climate crisis. As he has before, Biden sought to frame his energy proposals as an immediate necessity and a long-term economic boon focusing more on new jobs and a cleaner economy that would offset any initial costs.
“Donald Trump’s climate denial may not have caused these fires and hurricanes,” Biden said. “But if he gets a second term, these hellish events will continue to become more common and more devastating and more deadly.”
Trump visited McClellan Park, a former U.S. Air Force Base about 10 miles outside Sacramento that is used by firefighters as a staging area for large aircraft used in combating blazes. Most of the largest firefighting aircraft have not been utilized in recent days due to heavy smoke limiting visibility.
Biden’s running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, will return to her home state on Tuesday to meet with emergency service personnel to be briefed on the state’s wildfires.
In 2015, Trump stated bluntly: “I’m not a believer in global warming, I’m not a believer in man-made global warming.” After the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report concluded climate change would hurt the economy, Trump said he read it but didn’t believe it. In September 2019, he falsely slammed the Green New Deal as an effort that would lead to “No more cows. No more planes … no more people, right?”
Climate scientists say rising heat and worsening droughts in California consistent with climate change have expanded what had been the state’s autumn wildfire season to year-round, sparking bigger, deadlier and more frequent fires.
All five of the state’s largest fires in history have raged in the past three years, including the deadliest fire, a 2018 blaze that killed 85 people when it swept through the town of Paradise on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Trump during his Monday visit awarded seven members of the California National Guard the Distinguished Flying Cross for the rescue of dozens of Californians during the 2018 Paradise fires.
An analysis out in August from Stanford climate and wildfire researcher Michael Goss and others found that a nearly 2-degree (1 Celsius) rise in autumn temperatures and 30 percent drop in rainfall has more than doubled the number of autumn days with extreme fire weather over the past 40 years.
All five of the state’s hottest days on record have struck since 2014, overlapping one of the state’s worst droughts on record.
The link “isn’t surprising. It’s born out by the observations. And the future is not looking any better,” Goss said in an interview.
Maybe Trump believes the science but is lying again so not to cause panic. Of course he will then seek to penalize all that disagree with his lie, but that is probably because truth causes panic.
It is remarkable how far our politicians will go to deny what is obvious.
Notice a Trumpy pattern?
1. Deny the problem (Other people thought of it, therefore it’s their problem).
2. De-Legitimize those saying there’s a problem.
3. Tell everyone things are going to be OK.
4. DO NOTHING!
Decomposed:
1. Tell everyone things are going to be ok, because eventually they either will get solved, or we’ll all be dead, right. So Mr. Stable Genius ‘can’t’ go wrong. He’s 100% right, it will get colder in winter, after catastrophic loss (other people’s losses…)
2. Do nothing, because if you do something, you will A. Have to actually do some work. B. Might have to own a decision that goes wrong. And that is not in the Trump/Cohn playbook…
He contended anew that Democratic state leaders are to blame for failing to rake leaves and clear dead timber from forest floors.
“When you have years of leaves, dried leaves on the ground, it just sets it up,” Trump said. “It’s really a fuel for a fire. So they have to do something about it.”
if that is so why didn’t Trump arrange for the raking of the forest floors which he has advocated for the Federally owned forests in California which are the majority of forest acerage?
The scientific community may have a “consensus”, but they don’t know for sure.
I’d be surprised if they even purport to know for sure.
So…is there even a disagreement here?
Anyone who reads this article without salivating over either pro or anti Trump sentiments will realise it’s just two sides saying ‘maybe’ to each other.
The only ones spurning science are the democrats who tell us there are many genders(I think they are up to 63) and that one can change their gender at will.
1 more thing. for those on this web site that are a) jewish and b) believe in Torah MiSinai, we all know that HaShem alone controls the weather. He does not delegate to a malach. So called “climate science” is kfira similar to “evolution” science. We need Rav Avigdor Miller z”tl with us (sigh).
I am a person with a degree in science, worked in my field for many years and know how people operate. In order to get more money for their “research” work they come up with all kinds of BS to justify more money to study such and such.
That is the BS of climate control: they want more money! So they make outrageous statements…..
The AP likes to make this all dramatic. Like Oy vey the wild fires smell, therefore, this must be the soltuion. As if we learned anything from covid. Just because something happens doesn’t mean we know anything. So now we know the weather is the wamrest in a century. Is that cylcial? Is that due to carbon emissions? Can we really fix it?
You gotta love these AP headlines: “trump spurns science”! As Ernest Rutherford (a pioneer in nuclear physics) once said “‘All science is either physics or stamp collecting”. So it’s 2020, and what do we have? Fake news sources pushing junk science.
Trump is right “man made global warming” is a complete fraud, No such a thing exists in the world.
Cuomo of NY didn’t follow science_ Threw old people into nursing homes to rot dead. California Devils don’t follow science – letting filth , garbage destroy health and produce fires. Devil governors and mayors don’t follow science- encouraging hordes of barbarians to violently protest and rob and murder.
The so called science has been wrong on every one of their predictions for the last 30 years on so called global warming, every single one.
science do not know, but scientists have their opinions mostly which have to do with how to get government fundings……
once again, “climate science” is not science. It all started with the soviets that politicized science for political purposes. The forces that have been dominating this country for decades have adopted soviet tactics. Again, real science: 1) propose hypothesis 2) perform experiment (not collect statistics which is manipulated) 3) admit you were wrong when the experiment does not support the hypothesis 4) repeat the cycle to get closer to the truth. The scientific process in this country has been corrupted, even in the so called “hard” sciences since jobs and gubberment grants are involved. So number 3 above got a bit forgotten in all that search for truth…