When sea swallows Mar-a-Lago will that be a hoax?
By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post
Someday, in the not-so-distant future, sea-level rise could claim Mar-a-Lago. Perhaps President Trump — by then no doubt disgraced, shunned and all but forgotten — would still be around to see his beloved Florida resort wiped out by a “Chinese hoax.”
Of all the wrongheaded policies Trump and his Republican Party insist on pursuing, their stubborn denial of climate change is the most baffling; and the most obviously self-destructive. Everything is personal with Trump. Can’t anybody get it through his head that his own coastal properties are urgently threatened? And that he is going out of his way to hasten their demise?
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday that July 2019 was the hottest month on planet Earth since record-keeping began in the years after the Civil War. Wherever you live, think back to all the punishing heat waves you’ve experienced. Globally, July was worse.
The month saw unprecedented triple-digit temperatures in parts of Europe where summers are usually mild at best. On July 25, thermometers in Cambridge, England, soared to 101.7 degrees; an all-time record for the United Kingdom. That same day, Paris saw a high of 108.7, which broke the previous all-time record by a full 4 degrees. Meanwhile, much of the United States baked in an unrelenting heat wave, with day after day in the 90s. And earlier in the month, Alaska saw its highest temperatures since record-keeping began, with residents of Anchorage enduring a Floridian 90-degree afternoon.
July also saw the area covered by polar sea ice shrink to record lows in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, according to NOAA. In the Arctic, there was almost 20 percent less ice than normal, or what used to be normal.
“Yes, but it snowed the other day in Australia,” denialists will say. Well, of course it did. It’s winter down there. Global warming doesn’t mean the seasons no longer march through their yearly progression. It just means that, on average, the planet is warmer than it used to be. It means that heat waves are becoming worse and more frequent, it means that weather patterns are changing, and it means that anomalous phenomena are being seen in the unlikeliest places. Thunderstorms generally occur in temperate and tropical zones. A few days ago, one was detected within 300 miles of the North Pole.
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