Let's not kid ourselves. We really are on an increasingly different planet, even if it is still called Earth. In case you hadn't noticed, it recently was summer in what passes for winter in the American West, Southwest, and northern Mexico. From Los Angeles to Arizona, temperatures went wild, hitting 108 degrees in some places and setting repeated records across the region for summer-style heat in -- yes! -- March!!! (Even San Francisco broke all seasonal records by hitting 90 degrees.) And then, of course, there was that small desert town in Arizona where the temperature reached 110 degrees, the highest March temperature ever recorded in this country. Consider all of that, as hurricane scientist Jeff Masters and meteorologist Bob Henson put it, "one of the most extreme weather events in world history." And none of it, including the shattering of temperature records in 140 cities from California to Missouri, according to a team of scientists, would have been conceivable without climate change.
And, of course, that it's only likely to get far worse in this country and on this planet is an undeniable reality, made ever more so by the fact that Donald Trump, a climate-change denier of the first order -- he's bluntly called it "the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world" -- is president of the United States for nearly three more years. And worse yet, he continues to create global chaos by making (and threatening) more war in the Middle East (and elsewhere) -- militaries and wars being giant machines for releasing ever more planet-warming greenhouse gases (and the U.S. military being "the world's largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter").
Talk about creating chaos on Planet Earth! Of course, that should surprise no one, as chaos is (or at least should be) Donald Trump's middle name. And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, whose most recent book is all too appropriately entitled All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change, take you in a stunning fashion into a world where "hell" might become an all-too-mild descriptive word. Tom
The Leadership Team from Hell on a Hell of a Planet
How Trump's Incompetence and Looming Global Catastrophes May Intersect
On March 13th, buried in the New York Times's coverage of the U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict was a headline that would have been easy to miss amid the din of war coverage: "As El Niño Simmers, Scientists Warn of Weather Extremes Starting in Late Summer." Many readers may not even have noticed it, but that article noted that scientists at the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had raised their estimate for an El Niño event this summer from 60% to about 80%.
Admittedly, in this strange world of ours, that hardly seemed like an earth-shattering revelation. But if you had read the piece more closely, your alarm bells should instantly have gone off. Forecasters now predict that the coming El Niño -- a warming of the Pacific Ocean that deeply affects global weather patterns -- is likely to be as severe as the one in 2023-2024, which triggered severe flooding and prolonged heatwaves around the world. As the article noted, however, average world temperatures are now actually higher than they were at the height of that previous El Niño, thanks to global warming, and so it's likely that we will face even more intense heatwaves and flooding this time around.
Consider that news alarming enough. Unfortunately, the bad news didn't end there. The Times article went on to report that, since early last year, the Trump administration has laid off thousands of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) workers, greatly diminishing the agency's ability to respond to such impending weather disasters. And then there's the dismal fact that Trump has overseen the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which once sent humanitarian aid to disaster-struck countries.
And, sadly enough, it only gets worse from there. After all, we know that the Trump administration is doing everything it can to boost the production of fossil fuels -- the consumption of which is the main driver of global warming -- even as it also works to impede global action to slow the warming process. On January 7th, for example, the president announced that the United States would withdraw from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the bedrock treaty upon which most international efforts to rein in that onrushing nightmare are based.
Likewise, on February 12th, the administration repealed the scientific determination (called the "endangerment finding") that gives the government the legal authority to combat climate change. And that's not all: on March 15th, the Times also reported that the administration was preparing to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the nation's premier institution for studying global weather patterns -- including the severe climate disturbances we can expect from the coming El Niño and higher world temperatures. In other words, the rest of us will not only be deprived of emergency assistance during future climate disasters, but also lack timely information about oncoming hazardous weather patterns.
As I consumed all of that -- in the midst, of course, of President Trump's ill-conceived war on Iran -- it struck me that we need to brace ourselves for ever more calamitous outcomes from Donald Trump's extreme leadership incompetence. In fact, his incompetence is likely to produce one mega-disaster after another, culminating perhaps in global political-economic collapse.
Trump's Profound Incompetence
Donald Trump's leadership incompetence has already been demonstrated in one bad move after another. His capricious imposition of ever-fluctuating tariffs on U.S. imports, for example, has caused prolonged misery for farmers and many small and medium businesses that depend on predictable trade patterns. Likewise, his heavy-handed deployment of armed ICE and other federal agents to Minneapolis achieved little in the way of apprehending dangerous immigrants but caused widespread disorder and violence, while killing two nonviolent protestors. But the most severe example of his governing incompetence to date has been his handling of Operation Epic Fury, the war with Iran.
While devising an elaborate plan to destroy Iran's conventional military capabilities and shatter the regime, the Trump team appears to have made no preparations to eliminate the Iranians' extensive drone capabilities or their ability to disrupt oil production and transit in the Persian Gulf area, with far-reaching global consequences. As of this reporting, the critical Strait of Hormuz through which one-fifth of the world's oil supply passes every day (along with a substantial share of its liquified natural gas [LNG] and chemical fertilizers) remains largely closed to commercial traffic. This has produced energy shortages in many countries that are heavily reliant on imported oil and/or LNG and, because oil is a globally-traded commodity, it has boosted gasoline prices in the United States, despite the fact that this country doesn't import much Middle Eastern oil.
None of this should have been unexpected. The Iranians have, on numerous occasions, threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz in response to a U.S. attack on their country, while their efforts to build up a vast stockpile of drones and missiles (and to hide them in remote underground sites) were well publicized.
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