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The Trump Administration’s War On Science Is Worse Than the Inquisition

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Via:  don-overton  •  6 years ago  •  3 comments

The Trump Administration’s War On Science Is Worse Than the Inquisition
The White House’s crude deflections on science aren’t simply ignorant — they’re calculated to serve the fossil fuel industry at the entire planet’s expense

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T



  new   report   by the Union of Concerned Scientists lays out in shocking detail the scale and depth of the Trump administration’s assault on science and scientists.

It describes how the Interior Department has single-mindedly pursued an agenda of handing over the public lands it manages to oil and gas and other polluting and extractive industries, brushing aside concerns raised by its own scientists about climate change and other ecosystem impacts.


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Don Overton
Sophomore Quiet
1  seeder  Don Overton    6 years ago

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Tacos!
Professor Guide
2  Tacos!    6 years ago
In keeping with the anti-science zealotry on display at the Interior Department, President Trump lied about forest mismanagement being the prime cause of wildfires.

In his defense, it's an opinion, not a lie - an opinion shared by others.

California's Devastating Fires Are Man-Caused -- But Not In The Way They Tell Us

As timber harvesting permit fees went up and environmental challenges multiplied, the people who earned a living felling and planting trees looked for other lines of work. The combustible fuel load in the forest predictably soared. No longer were forest management professionals clearing brush and thinning trees.

But, fire suppression efforts continued. The result was accurately forecast by my forest management industry hosts in Siskiyou County in 2005: larger, more devastating fires—fires so hot that they sterilized the soil, making regrowth difficult and altering the landscape. More importantly, fires that increasingly threatened lives and homes as they became hotter and more difficult to bring under control.

In 2001, George E. Gruell, a wildlife biologist with five decades of experience in California and other Western states, authored the book, “ Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849 .” Gruell’s remarkable effort compared hundreds of landscape photographs from the dawn of photography with photos taken from the same location 100 years later or more. The difference was striking. In the 1850s and 1860s, the typical Sierra landscape was of open fields of grass punctuated by isolated pine stands and a few scattered oak trees. The first branches on the pine trees started about 20 feet up—lower branches having been burned off by low-intensity grassfires. California’s Native American population had for years shaped this landscape with fire to encourage the grasslands and boost the game animal population.

To Help Prevent the Next Big Wildfire, Let the Forest Burn

Much of California’s forestland is overgrown, partly because of federal regulations implemented in 1910, which mandated stamping out wildfires as soon as possible.

None of this is to say that better forest management will prevent all wildfires, but the issue of forest management should not be dismissed out of hand just because it was raised by Trump. That's not scientific either.

 
 
 
Thrawn 31
Professor Participates
3  Thrawn 31    6 years ago

It should be Trump's war on reality. As far as I can tell reality to him is whatever he thinks it is, however he thinks things are facts and evidence be damned. Honestly he reminds me of Hitler in his bunker in the final days, planning battles with divisions and equipment that didn't exist. Kinda like his claim that he just authorized 115 miles of wall be built (zero detail on where the funds came from, or the contract naturally) and they are going to be having a groundbreaking ceremony in January. Who wants to bet me that he MAYBE does a photo op in the desert and in the following months nothing actually happens. 

 
 
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