Oklahoma Oceanfront Mr. Pruitt?

This week Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), again questioned if human-induced climate change was really such a bad thing. Yesterday’s headline from The Hill, a leading Washington D.C. news organization, read:

“EPA chief’s questions about climate science draw new scrutiny”

Mr. Pruitt acknowledged that climate was changing and that we may be partly responsible. Then he questioned how we could know what the best temperature was for our world and noted that generally that warmer was better. As they quoted him:

“We know that humans have most flourished during times of, what? Warming trends. So I think there’s assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing.”

I know he is from Oklahoma, where winters can be extremely cold, so perhaps warmer just seems better to him. However, Mr. Pruitt might do well to check the EPA’s own website. One page has a clear graph of “Heat Related Deaths” showing a significant upward trend. And have we forgotten the 35,000 deaths in Europe caused by the heat wave in 2003? 

The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement set a goal to limit the warming to one additional degree Celsius (about one and a half degrees Fahrenheit) over present. It is questionable that we can even achieve those global targets. Now Mr. Pruitt is advocating that those goals to limit warming are not necessarily a good idea. Yet the overwhelming majority of scientists believe that our entire ecosystem has flourished during the relatively stable climate of the last 11,000 years. Except for the United States, governmental leaders of essentially all nations are on record that stopping global warming should be a top priority.

And what about rising sea level? Mr. Pruitt had no comment on that in the remarks quoted this week. Of course that is understandable, since Oklahoma is land locked — at least for now, LOL. 

That started an interesting line of thought. Is Mr. Pruitt aware that:

• Over thousands of years, global sea level changes by roughly 20 meters per degree Celsius of global temperature change (about 35 feet per degree Fahrenheit).
• As the ice on Greenland and Antarctica continues to melt faster and faster, that global rising sea level will move the coastline for aeons, submerging thousands of coastal communities.
• From Boston to Bangladesh, Calcutta to Copenhagen, and Miami to the Maldives, cities worldwide are already experiencing much worse flooding.

Of course “no worries” for Oklahoma. They are presently far from the sea, so not immediately vulnerable. But could the idea of “Oklahoma Oceanfront” be a reason for Mr. Pruitt to embrace a warmer planet that will have less polar ice, even though it would put all coastal cities underwater? Hmmmm.

Sarcasm aside, a warmer world is neither benign nor beneficial to life on Earth as we know it. Anyone who believes that warming the planet will be a good thing – is either ignorant or disingenuous.