Trump’s biggest crime
The upper echelon of the MAGA elite is composed mostly of old white guys with bad diets. Because they’re selfish they have no vested interest in the future of our beleaguered planet. Some would scoff, others would laugh, but most would scratch their heads and wonder what I mean because they’re also stupid, but all would agree that, once they had time to understand it, a .59 centimetre rise in ocean levels, instead of the more modest and predicted .43, isn’t particularly concerning.
And they’d be wrong. It’s not just concerning, it’s alarming. Even NASA, which usually gets the ocean level rise predictions spot on to the second decimal place, didn’t see this coming. It turns out that, apart from melting glaciers, there’s a new problem causing rising ocean levels. It’s called “thermal expansion.”
Thermal expansion is caused by warm water. Because it’s less dense than cold water it expands more, hence rising ocean levels. This is an example of something that seems obvious now but no one thought to factor it in. In their predictions NASA forgot to factor it in.
So now we have two major factors to concern ourselves about that cause ocean levels to rise, melting glaciers and thermal expansion. The warmer it gets year on year, the faster those two metrics will increase, and the more they will start to cause major problems like flooding and storms.
Which brings us to another worry. What other dominoes that we don’t know about are quietly sitting out there ready to fall? We don’t know, but when you monkey around with bafflingly complex systems like global climate, you’re setting yourself up for some unexpected and terrifying outcomes.
Well, we’ve got four years to not only ignore it all, but make it worse. Yes, Trump and his “administration” of pirates and thugs are corrupt oligarchs who hate democracy, are wrecking the economy, violating human rights and defunding America’s social services in order to enrich themselves.
Horrible as all that is, it takes a backseat to global climate change. After all, if we destroy the planet, at the end of the day it doesn’t matter if we do it as a shining beacon on a hill or from the sewers of human greed and depravity, the planet will still be dead, and so will we.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.