By Tom Harris

President Donald Trump was right to ignore climate change in his April 22, 2019 Earth Day message. Instead, he focused on issues that actually matter and over which we have considerable control: protecting the nation’s water infrastructure, conservation of land, water, and wildlife, improving forest health and, of course, economic prosperity, the linchpin on which all the rest is founded. After all, without prosperity, we cannot afford to protect the environment. Trump explained in his official Earth Day statement:

“Environmental protection and economic prosperity go hand in hand. A strong market economy is essential to protecting our critical natural resources and fostering a legacy of conservation. “

He is correct, of course, but this did not go over well with those concerned about man-made climate change. BNN Bloomberg reported that Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, complained, “The statement is really the antithesis of environmental protection. They are not mentioning the gravest existential threat [man-made climate change] facing humanity.”

The UK-based Guardian newspaper reported, in an article reposted by the left-leaning magazine Mother Jones, “The executive director of the Sierra Club said Trump was ‘the worst president for the environment our nation has ever had.’”

Concerns about dangerous human-caused climate change are not based on observations of what is actually happening in the real world. Even NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies admits that between 1880 and 2019 there has been only slightly more than a one-degree Celsius rise in the so-called ‘Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature’ despite a supposed 40% rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration.

And extreme weather is not increasing. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) database of state-wide extreme weather records, likely the best of its kind, shows that, in 2018, only one state record was set—the largest hailstone (5.38 inches in diameter) in the history of Alabama. So far, only one record has been set in 2019: the lowest temperature recorded in Illinois (-38°F on Mount Carroll). In fact, in the first 18+ years of the 21^st century, only two states recorded their maximum temperatures—South Carolina in 2012 and South Dakota in 2006 (the latter tied with 1936, when 15 states established their all-time maximum temperature records).

Full story here:

https://townhall.com/columnists/tomharris/2019/04/23/trumps-perfect-earth-day-statement-n2545228