The world may breach the 1.5 Celsius temperature rise threshold in just a few short years, at least temporarily. It was predictable for decades and part of the Paris climate accords that emphasized must never come to pass. It was signed by the global community at the United Nations during the Obama administration.
As the planetary temperatures rise unabated, more and more water vapor from the oceans is held by the atmosphere. The climate system is deteriorating rapidly, and Hurricanes in the Atlantic are getting bigger, wetter, stronger, and slower.
In 2017, president dumb fu@k made some stunning comments to top staff about hurricanes. It is as ignorant and dangerous for the climate and resilience as you would expect.
The people of Puerto Rico, St. Charles, LA, and the panhandle of Florida can testify of his incompetence and racism during the calamity of a major storm. He redirected funding from FEMA to pay for his racist wall at the Mexican border. What a monster.
Near the beginning of Donald Trump’s time in office, the then-president had a pressing question for his national-security aides and administration officials: Does China have the secret technology — a weapon, even — to create large, man-made hurricanes and then launch them at the United States? And if so, would this constitute an act of war by a foreign power, and could the U.S. retaliate militarily? Then-President Trump repeatedly asked about this, according to two former senior administration officials and a third person briefed on the matter.
“It was almost too stupid for words,” said a former Trump official intimately familiar with the then-sitting president’s inquiry. “I did not get the sense he was joking at all.”
The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, tell Rolling Stone that Trump began interrogating national-security officials and other staffers about the alleged weapon during the first year of his presidency, and his question would pop up sporadically until at least 2018. Two of the sources recalled that as Trump got deeper into the second year in his term, he started to drop the topic, and occasionally joked about it.
In certain circles within the upper ranks of Trumpland, the then-leader of the free world’s query became such a mockable occurrence that it became known among some as the “Hurricane Gun” thing.
“I was present [once] when he asked if China ‘made’ hurricanes to send to us,” said the other former senior official. Trump “wanted to know if the technology existed. One guy in the room responded, ‘Not to the best of my knowledge, sir.’ I kept it together until I got back to my office… I do not know where the [then-]president would have heard about that… He was asking about it around the time, maybe a little before, he asked people about nuking hurricanes.”
Hurricane season officially starts on June 1 and ends at the end of November.
Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley reveal this nugget in their reporting as well:
More recently, right-wing believers in the QAnon conspiracy theories have taken to arguing that President Joe Biden used a Chinese-made weather weapon to send the freezing weather that crippled Texas power lines as Sen. Ted Cruz fled to Cancun, Mexico.
These cretins must not obtain power again, ever.
Hurricane Dorian was what finally kicked me in the rear end and move from S Florida and the coast.