President Donald Trump wants you to fear migrants, who pose no real threat, but he wants you to remain ignorant about climate change, which is a danger to us today and potentially deadly to our children and grandchildren.

The administration chose the Friday after Thanksgiving, when people were busy shopping and national attention was being diverted to the border, to release a federal report on climate change put together through the research of 300 scientists and more than a dozen government agencies and private institutions.

The report, under the weighty title of Volume II of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, lays out in chilling detail the dangers of rising global temperatures.

Consequences of ignoring science

They include economic losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars, impacting just about every business. Worse drought. Worse wildfires. Rising sea levels. Health dangers owing to changes to air quality. Diseases spread by insects and other pests. Food and water shortages.

Some of this is happening already, some of it is heading our way unless we participate in global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Only instead of reacting to the fact-based the report prepared by his own government – or at least getting a qualified scientist to brief him on it – President Trump lives in denial, tweeting before the report was made public:

Every middle school student probably knows that climate change is measured over long periods of time and not by the weather in a day or a week. And what we know for a fact is that long-term trends say we are living in the warmest weather in human history.

David Easterling, director of the Technical Support Unit at the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, explained it this way.

He said, "The global average temperature is much higher and is rising more rapidly than anything modern civilization has experienced, and this warming trend can only be explained by human activities."

A lot of data about the increase in the earth’s surface temperature, which causes wild disruptions in weather patterns, rising sea levels and more, is gathered by NASA satellites circling the earth.

Problems caused by 'human activity'

The government space agency says global warming is “the result of human activity since the mid-20th century and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented over decades to millennia.”

And the president, who should be leading the way to combat the problem, dismisses it because of a temporary cold snap.

A leader has to be able to see the big picture.

Look at it this way.

The curveball of denial

In 2017, a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers named Rich Hill tossed a no-hitter through nine innings - nearly a perfect game. In the bottom of the tenth, however, Pittsburgh Pirate batter Josh Harrison hit a home run against Hill, and the Pirates won the game 1-0.

Imagine if, after the game, Hill’s manager called Hill a lousy pitcher.

The president saying climate change doesn’t exist because of a single cold weekend is like saying Hill must not be a good pitcher because after nine inning of no-hit baseball he gave up a home run.

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

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