Denying Climate Change

ITS EARLY JANUARY, and spring is just around the corner, amazingly. The big trees in my yard have buds, as if the leaves are ready to pop out. Pop out they will, well before March first. Fifty years ago in my locale the trees were still barren on March twenty. Irises could spring up out of the ground at any time. Last year at about this time it did exactly that, and promptly got burned on a freezing night. The climate has changed drastically in the past fifty years, and everyone my age (seventy) or older agrees. It is becoming difficult, neary impossible to deny climate change, so conservatives are now much more prone to acknowledge it. They still have the option of refusing to attribute it to human industry, which they invariably utilize, in their desperate need to deny any need to make fundamental changes to society politically, and economically. I plan to take a short but scenic road trip when the first blush of iight green yellowish color spreads across the tree covered hills of the Ozark Mountain biosphere. My best guess as to when this will take place is early to mid March. Nowadays you just never know. Last year spring sprang late,in late March, just like back in teh old days. Who knows? Maybe climate change is reversing itself, and the climate is going back to the wa it used to be, as President Trump, in all his wisdom, promised us it would do. He didn't specify when. Its a hoax, says the prevaricating president, but if it exists,its only because nature wanted it that way, we had nothing to do with it, and, in any event, it'll soo get back to normal. the sea level will stop rising suddenly, for no apparent reason,the atmosphere will cleanse itself of a trillion tons of carbon, and the immense amount of heat energy that has been trapped in the atmosphere in recent years shall magically, mysteriously radiate harmlessly away into outer space, of its own volition. As is so often the case, H.L. Mencken's famous quote applies here: "The fools would be humorous were they not in such deadly earnest." As always, the great tragedy is not only that a presumed reasonably intelligent group of people, the American people, would actually choose as their head of state a perosn who would actually utter such nonsense, but that those same people seem perfectly willing and content to believe it. Of all the pernicious, harmful policy positions embraced by Trump and MAGA, none is as pernicious and harmful to humanity as climate denial. Not the racism, not the aggressive, angry foreign policy, not the cruelty towards the poor, the verbal abuse of those to dare depart from the fuhrer and his fscism. Of all the numerous vile, disgusting aspects of Trumpism, climate change denial is by far the mostevil, the most harmful. Climate change, according to the D.O.D., is the greatest threat to American national security. Neither China, nor Russia, nor gay people, nor liberalism. Global warming, climate change, which, for the benefit of conservatives, are the same thing. The conservative approach to climate change, pretending that either it does nto exist or that if it doe sit is unimportant, is insane, suicide. There are a million reasons to get rid of Trump and to defeat his MAGA mob, and that is going to happen. The entire agenda is poison. But the argument which the Democrats must make above all, and must make it early, often, and incessantly, is that cliamte change is real, and that Trump, the Republican party, and conservative America generally, by refusing to take strong action against it, are contributing to the destruction of the United States and the extinction of the human species.