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Alternative Facts on Climate Change

Smoking is good for you, it opens up your lungs — by making you cough.

The Internet is a wonderful thing. You have all the information in the world available at your fingertips — literally, but some of the information is just plain wrong. Take the ongoing outbreak of measles in the United States. It has been fueled by the Internet. Bad information being passed around from friend to friend, and friends asking to "forward this to everyone you know!"

Thus, if you are looking for a contrarian view to climate change — you can find it. The problem scientists and realists are having is that today you have the Trump administration trying to muddy the waters on facts and what you see lapping at your feet along our Eastern and Gulf coasts. I've noticed that there has been a shift in the last couple of years from the outright "temperatures are not getting warmer" to acknowledging it is warmer, but humans are not the cause. This is the "climate variability argument" that ice ages come and go, etc. If humans are not the cause, then human actions like adding carbon to the atmosphere is not to be blamed, and therefore we can keep making loads of money off of fossil fuels.  

See the latest effort to throw water on the climate fire to create as much smoke as possible, White House Climate Panel to Include a Climate Denialist.

You should not let your opinion, your wallet, or your political beliefs overcome science and facts. The fact here in the Pacific Northwest is that I think we have turned the corner and our summers, July-September, mean we'll be living in a smoky haze from wildfires burning in the region. This is our sea-level rise issue in the West in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. Perhaps (?) seismic uplift along the coast is taking care of sea rise for the moment. 

Claire Rubin, Senior Researcher, shared the link above. 

Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.