Pruitt says a warming climate is not “necessarily a bad thing”

Scott Pruitt

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is another in the long line of Trump appointees who seem to have been put in office solely to undermine their own agencies. He’s a well-known climate-science denier who couldn’t have his head any further up the fossil fuel industry’s backside if he used a hydraulic ram. And in a recent interview, he said something that takes a kernel of of truth and tosses it into a septic tank of mendacity:

Even if climate change is occurring, as the vast majority of scientists say it is, a warmer atmosphere might not be so awful for humans, according to Pruitt.

“We know humans have most flourished during times of what, warming trends,” Pruitt said Tuesday during an interview on KSNV, an NBC affiliate in Las Vegas. “So I think there’s assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing. Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100, in the year 2018? That’s fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”

He implies that humankind can live through warmer periods, and that’s true – nothing about global warming or climate change puts the very survival of humanity as a species at risk. Humans have indeed lived through various upswings and downturns in the overall climate throughout their approximate 200,000-year history. That said, it’s important to note that for the vast majority of that time, they were nomadic hunter-gatherers whose homes consisted of roving camps made of animal skins and the occasional cave. They didn’t lose anything by packing up what few possessions they had and roaming halfway across a continent when food became scarce.

It shouldn’t be necessary to point this out, but that’s not how modern civilization works. We have established cities now, and those aren’t easy to move around, which will be a problem once they’re flooded due to rising sea levels. A changing climate will also bring extreme variations in weather of all types, so if you thought 2017 was extraordinary with its endless hurricanes, widespread forest fires and record-setting heat waves, imagine all that as being part of the new normal, or even tame compared to what’s to come. More than that, our society will be threatened on a much more fundamental level once our food supply, the vast majority of which comes from agriculture that’s dependent on a stable and predictable climate, starts drying up. And that’s not even considering what this roller-coaster of uncertainty will do to the global economy as things get progressively more severe.

Humanity can absolutely survive a shifting climate. Humanity’s current way of life absolutely cannot. You’d expect anyone in a position of power, especially in what’s supposed to be one of the richest and most educated countries on the planet, would be aware of the difference. But with Pruitt, as with all of Trump’s entourage, it’s hard to tell whether his incompetence stems from sheer ignorance, or whether it’s deliberate. Neither scenario bodes well.

(via @BadAstronomer)