Other Views: ‘What a difference 12 years makes’ on climate
Monica Medina, USA TODAY:
“When I was the deputy administrator of NOAA under President Barack Obama, we believed that climate change was making our weather more severe, but we were cautious about directly connecting those dots. We looked at the data and realized that our storms were increasingly impactful and costly. We started publicizing the number of ‘billion dollar storms’ and tweeting about severe weather to better warn the public in real time when their city or region was about to get walloped. But still the agency was cautious not to attribute any one storm or event to climate change. What a difference 12 years makes. Now the public can and does see for itself that climate change is altering our weather patterns and wreaking havoc on people’s lives today. Not a section of the country has been spared a climate change-related devastating event in just the month of August alone . ... Donald Trump’s major ‘contribution’ to severe weather response is to try to divert money from disaster relief to pay for legally dubious executive orders he made by fiat for COVID-19 response.”
Dana Milbank, The Washington Post:
“Just before the election in 2012, Trump scolded President Barack Obama for campaigning while victims of Hurricane Sandy were still reeling . ... Actually, Trump was the one who was wrong at the time — both Obama and Mitt Romney had suspended their campaigns for a while — and now his old criticism of Obama makes Trump look ridiculous. On Wednesday, Hurricane Laura approached the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Texas with a storm surge that the National Hurricane Center called ‘unsurvivable’ and ‘catastrophic.’ But Trump decreed that the show would go on: The Republican National Convention would resume Wednesday night as scheduled.”
Conrad Black, The Hill:
“Republicans sliced horizontally through Joe Biden’s innocuous, passive candidacy surmounting a militant Bernie Sanders-ite program, no part of which enjoys majority support among the American public. Barring an unlikely flare-up of the virus or a historic faux pas by the president, this electoral race should now begin to open up in Trump’s favor.”
Leigh Guidry, USA TODAY:
“The COVID-19 pandemic is like a blizzard for me and south Louisiana; we don’t know how to handle it. The ongoing threat of the virus has meant doing something ‘normal,’ like covering a hurricane, in a different way . ... But it’s necessary. The public needs to know what’s safe and what’s not, to know what has happened to their fellow humans. Those people deserve to have their stories told, and that is something we know how to do. This time we’ll do it in masks.”