OTHER VIEWS Listen to the experts

As rains fell and floodwaters rose in Houston, U.S. President Donald Trump took to Twitter with an “oh, gosh” tweet: “Wow — Now experts are calling #Harvey a once in 500 year flood! We have an all out effort going, and going well!”

How refreshing it is when the president directs our attention to the words of experts — people who ascertain facts, study the issues, dissect the causes of problems, and put their biases and suppositions aside to figure out solutions.

If Trump himself were to consult the experts — such as, you know, climate scientists — he would learn that global warming is real. He’d also learn that although warming did not cause hurricane Harvey, it certainly makes such storms stronger, more unpredictable and quicker to intensify. Experts — there’s that word again — say that warmer air temperatures mean more evaporation of moisture from the seas to the skies, and thus more rainfall from storms. Warmer seas — including the Gulf of Mexico — intensify storms, from their size to their wind speeds, and amplify storm surges.

This is the hot, hard reality the world faces, and as we’ve noted before, Trump, along with his Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and other proponents of increasing fossil-fuel production, are leading the nation in a dangerous direction. This can’t be written off as merely an issue of honest policy differences; their beliefs and agenda imperil the health and safety of the people they have sworn to protect.

As difficult as it might be for someone so incapable of introspection and re-evaluation, the president needs to understand that he has subscribed to fake science, and that he must alter his course.