So asks Zoya Teirstein who than provides the answer in a brilliant piece for Grist titled: Trump tweets overshadowed these major climate stories in 2017.
It’s been a brutal year for the earth. Climate change disasters have engulfed the world, and it is only the beginning of what promises to be a looming dystopian world with more powerful and intense hurricanes, wildfires, ice shelf collapse, horrifying losses of sea ice at both poles that will have devastating ripple effects, flash droughts, water shortages, disease and on and on.
Given the seriousness of the issue, one would think that climate stories would be the top news story every single day planet-wide. But it hasn’t been. Instead the world is focused on the illegitimate imbecile that currently occupies the oval office along with his idiotic and chaotic tweets.
Teirstein points out that in February, the United States had freakishly hot weather that lasted for 27 days:
Meanwhile, our newly inaugurated president sent well over 150 tweets from his personal Twitter. None of them mentioned the record-breaking heat. Instead, the “failing New York Times” and “fake news CNN” featured prominently. If you’re a news junkie, it’s more likely that you remember Trump’s phone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull — which ended abruptly — than the winter heatwave. Major news outlets covered the diplomatic falling out heavily, and continued writing about the call until August.
Pointing out that the February heatwave primed a few states for wildfire, the media was focused on yet another moronic tweet. Roya writes:
Perhaps the increasingly worrying links between extreme heat, fires, and climate change would have been the talk around office water coolers, but we were all a little preoccupied at the time with an ongoing feud between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Trump. No, really, we were. The celebrity politicians were bickering about The Apprentice — an NBC show that Trump executive produces and formerly hosted. Schwarzenegger was the current host, and the show was suffering from poor ratings, according to no less an authority than the president of the United States. In his opening remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump said: “I want to just pray for Arnold, if we can, for those ratings.” That breakfast was on Feb. 2. We were reading about the feud until March.
In June Arizona was so blistering hot that flights were canceled or delayed because it was unsafe to fly due to the heat.
On June 21, President Trump did mention air travel, but not in reference to the planes that were grounded due to heat. “Just landed in Iowa,” he tweeted on his way to a campaign-like rally he held after he was already president. That month, Trump’s tweets about former FBI Director James Comey, the Russia investigation, and the border wall dominated the news cycle. Trump claimed he had recordings of conversations with Comey. The House Intelligence Committee then asked him to furnish the tapes on June 23. They never materialized.
There was the worrisome news of flash droughts in Montana and the other high plains states. Ash from wildfires in big sky country rained down in Seattle.
But flash droughts didn’t make the news this summer. A photograph of Trump touching a weird, glowing orb with King Salman of Saudi Arabia and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt was dominating social media and the news cycle at the time. Naturally, conspiracy theories abounded.
And the hurricanes, Harvey, Irma and Maria. We talked about them right? Kind of. The humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico didn’t provide a sufficient news hook for major media outlets. But the U.S. territory did garner attention thanks to Trump’s Twitter feud with San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz. “The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump,” the president of the United States tweeted in late September.The shocking photos and videos that emerged after the wildfires in California. Surely he wasn’t able to distract us from those apocalyptic images. Well he did.
The United States was transfixed at the time by a fight Trump had picked with Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback who in 2016 started a trend of football players refusing to kneel for the National Anthem to protest police brutality against African Americans. The controversy exploded into the national spotlight in October when Trump called on the NFL to “fire” the roughly two dozen players who kneeled. The president tweeted that the players showed “total disrespect to our Flag & Country.”
Trump’s beef dominated the news through the end of November. Meanwhile, California faces $180 billion in wildfire damages and years of slow recovery.
There is much more in the Grist piece.
It’s quite discouraging, but I suppose we get what we deserve.
Video is brilliant, but if you have some little ones, you may want to cover their ears.
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