I don’t want to be the person to say this. I shouldn’t need to be the person to say this. I’m not a scientist, a meteorologist or a a climatologist. I don’t consider myself an expert in the field of global warming, or climate change, or whatever politically pleasing term for it we’re going to throw around this week. I only know that I was brought up with what I consider to be a good to above average education in a public school system that (gasp) valued facts over opinions and (shock) taught us scientific principles for evaluating scientific theories. If a theory can stand up to rigorous scrutiny and evaluation, tested and re-tested under the same circumstances and produce the same results, it can be considered more than a theory. That’s when a theory becomes KNOWLEDGE. The easiest example of this is picking up a rock with your hand and then letting go of it. Does the rock float? No. Does it fall to the ground? Yes. Will the same thing happen if you pick it up again? Yes. Observe – you have just proved that GRAVITY IS REAL. No one questions gravity. At least, no one sane does. Perhaps our President doesn’t believe in gravity. He may also think the Earth is flat. Neither of those things would surprise me.

At this point in the scientific community at large, global warming stopped being a theory and became ACCEPTED KNOWLEDGE a long time ago. It doesn’t even need to be postulated any more – the Earth’s surface temperature can be measured and recorded. Even if you weren’t going to accept the evidence of “a bunch of eggheads” who you believe are part of some “climate change conspiracy” (as if THAT’S a real thing) you don’t even need to look at the numbers. The decline in the annual amount of Arctic sea ice is visible through direct observation. For me it’s the equivalent of picking up a rock and letting it fall to the ground. Once you see it, you know it’s real, and you don’t need to see it again to confirm it’s real. Each year there’s less ice, and each year the global temperature increases, and if this still doesn’t make sense to you drop an ice cube in a glass of warm water. Watch the ice cube melt and watch the level of water in your glass rise. BINGO BONGO GLOBAL WARMING.

People don’t like to talk about hurricanes as evidence of global warming. It’s considered controversial or taboo for reasons I can’t possibly understand. No wait – I can understand – there are a lot of people who would rather put blindfolds on and stick their fingers in their ears so they can neither see nor hear the truth. If you’re not blind or willfully ignorant hear this: hurricanes are caused by (wait for it, wait for it) AN ABUNDANCE OF WARM OCEAN WATER. You don’t have to take my word for it because (again) this is accepted knowledge that is no longer questioned because it has been observed to happen the same way many times over many years. The warm water that evaporates off the ocean’s surface is the fuel that stokes the fire of every hurricane. The warmer the Earth’s surface gets, the more powerful the hurricanes are going to get, and the more deadly those hurricanes are going to become.

At this point the consequences of ignoring the evidence right in front of our faces is too dire to be left up to politics. Global warming should not be a choice between Democrat or Republican, between conservative or progressive, between the liberal left or the alt right, it should be a basic fundamental issue of HUMANITY VERSUS ITSELF. We are all in this struggle no matter what our political ideology might be. Do we want to pretend that the evidence that proves global warming isn’t real while the Earth’s surface temperature continues to rise, storms like Katrina, Harvey and Irma pound on our shores, and rising ocean levels eventually make a large part of our nation’s coastlines uninhabitable? Sure we can ignore it and let hundreds of millions of people die over the next century. Not exactly a nice thing to do to our loved ones who have to inhabit this Earth after we’re long gone, but yeah kick the can down the road if you like. It’s their problem, not ours. Or maybe, JUST MAYBE, we can elect a President in 2020 who doesn’t have his head so far up his own ass that he can actually accept the value of scientific evidence instead of leaving the rest of civilization to be leaders in our absence. Well done POTUS. I hope your children and grandchildren still have your posh resorts in Florida and New York to go to when you’re gone. Sooner or later the waters will reach them too and you’ll have done nothing to stop it, nor to prevent the suffering that so easily could have been prevented by simply lowering the amount of pollutants we emit into the atmosphere. The United States is both the biggest consumer of fossil fuels and the biggest emitter of carbon gases, so as much as I hate to say it, we’re already to blame for what’s happening in Texas and Florida. We will continue to be to blame for it unless rational thought TRUMPS climate change skeptics who think it’s all just a myth.

PS: If somebody says “the earth goes through warming and cooling cycles, this is normal, human beings have nothing to do with it” this infographic explains the difference between “natural cycles” and human air pollution for anybody who doesn’t get the difference between the two. And just because I feel like it here’s two cents from Stevie Wonder as well.