As a Miami Beach resident who is writing this surrounded by sand bags in preparation for Hurricane Irma, only a week after Hurricane Harvey ravaged Texas, I have an urgent question for President Donald Trump and his fellow climate change deniers: how many natural disasters will it take for you to listen to the world’s most prestigious scientists?
Last week, it was Hurricane Harvey, which left billions of dollars in damages and caused at least 60 deaths. This week, it’s Irma, already described as the biggest hurricane in recent memory in the Atlantic. And Hurricanes Jose and Katia formed behind it.
Climate deniers like Trump, citing fake news reports and pseudo-scientific studies, say the world has always had warmer and colder periods, and the current wave of global warming is just one more. According to their logic — and that of polluting industries that are behind it — mankind has nothing to do with this. It’s just nature, they claim.
But 97 percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is being caused by man-made toxic gases, according to a 2013 scientific paper that examined 11,944 climate abstracts. That paper drives
