I saw a video about how terrible Trump is being with the Environment. It's about 2 months old and has been viewed by over 5 million people.It tells us that U.S. President Donald Trump wants to prop up fossil fuels, but his own government agencies keep reporting the climate change threat. A newly obtained memo reveals one of his solutions: Just ignore them.
About the video it's been removed from my page but it basically said, "The rising sea level will kill us all and soon but Trump doesn't care."
At the end of the video there is some teeny tiny text listing their sources. So, I decided to explore.
The top source is The Washington Post. If you do a Google search for these words "washington post, memo, climate change, ignores memo" the article comes up first. I've listed it below for easy access. Interesting to note that Google lists 1,799,000 results for those exact terms. That's probably because so many news outlets took the WaPo story as Gospel and quoted it as a factual source. #astroturfing
The article by Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin, speaks of an internal memo from Sept 18th. It's pretty dire. Or that's what they imply. No copies of the memo are produced anywhere. (Did a Google search and I can't find it.)
This (pretend) memo that Trump supposedly denied, according to WaPo, came from a white house advisor. Except the guy in question is also considered a Wicked Evil Climate Denier. Michael Catanzaro worked for the Administration for 14 months. I'm almost sure he didn't have a Magical Environmental Epiphany just long enough to write a memo but then ... NAH... and quit to work as a lobbyist for the oil and gas industries. (Still looking for that internal memo.)
The video and the article speak of studies regarding rising sea levels. Strange findings tho: “Most studies performed on the resilience of these islands to sea-level rise have projected that they will experience minimal inundation impacts until even to the end of the 21st century. “
But ONE study looked at a possible result IF the waves possibly got higher. ( I imagine this is why Trump ignored the (pretend) memo since we don't panic and change everything over hypotheticals.)
Besides THAT, WaPo schools us, "NASA will put up two new satellite systems this year to study melting ice in the Earth’s polar regions and will continue airborne missions that study ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica." ( SO THERE!)
That's not quite how NASA explained it. NASA says: "This spring, NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences are scheduled to launch the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission, twin satellites that will continue the original GRACE mission’s legacy of tracking fluctuations in Earth's gravity field in order to detect changes in mass, including the mass of ice sheets and aquifers."
Do you see how the facts got skewed there?
WaPo doesn't mention who granted the budget Increase for NASA to enable them to do these studies? President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2019 budget request included $19.9 billion for NASA.
The budget request "reflects the administration's confidence that America will lead the way back to the moon and take the next giant leap from where we made that first small step for humanity nearly 50 years ago," said NASA acting administrator Robert Lightfoot
A second article from WaPo was also listed as a source on the video. There, WaPo also suggests Trump’s OWN military did a climate change study too and it’s WOW Scary.
It's scary! be Afraid for Trump will kill us all!
The results of the actual study say this:
"The future climate simulation developed projects that deep-water wave heights and wind speeds around Kwajalein Atoll will decrease slightly, resulting in a decrease in the magnitude and frequency of the threat to marine operations."
So when your hysterical liberal friends are freaking out and weeping (again!), please comfort them with facts.
This is propaganda and false.
Sources:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/05/23/in-an-internal-memo-the-white-house-considered-whether-to-simply-ignore-federal-climate-research/?utm_term=.71255b439029
https://www.desmogblog.com/mike-catanzaro
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/4/eaap9741.full
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/04/25/climate-change-could-make-thousands-of-tropical-islands-uninhabitable-in-coming-decades-new-study-says/
https://www.serdp-estcp.org/Program-Areas/Resource-Conservation-and-Resiliency/Infrastructure-Resiliency/Vulnerability-and-Impact-Assessment/RC-2334/
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-renews-focus-on-earths-frozen-regions
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-acting-administrator-statement-on-fiscal-year-2019-budget-proposal
