Climate fight presaged the rise of Trump

Lake Luzerne sign captures national mood: rage

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When I ask myself how we got here, nearing an election in which it appears we will again promote an immoral man into the presidency, I think about climate change, which opened my eyes to our ability to ignore reality.

I first heard of climate change in the mid-1980s at a meeting in Ray Brook of the Adirondack Park Agency, which I was covering for the Lake Placid News.

A man in a button-down shirt gave a drab presentation, with charts and numbers displayed on an easel. The earth was getting warmer, he said, humans were causing it and it was going to become a big problem.

Some attendees were rapt, which strengthened my belief that environmentalists would endorse any claim showing that humans were bad for the Earth.

“If only the weather were getting warmer,” I said to my dad, and we laughed.

Both he and I had made mini-careers of complaining in print about the weather in Saranac Lake. The notion Earth was warming appeared to be refuted every winter.

Curt Stager came to the Adirondacks in 1987 to work as a science professor at Paul Smith’s College, and, at first, he also was a climate change skeptic. But unlike me, he had the training (a Ph.d. in biology and geology from Duke University) to research the question, a pursuit he has continued to this day.

In Africa, South America, the South Pacific and the northern Adirondacks, his fieldwork has confirmed over and over that the Earth is warming, the climate is changing and the consequences are serious.

My skepticism has melted, too, because of the work done by Stager and thousands of other scientists around the world. Over the years, their research has produced what Stager has called a “massive interlocking structure” of evidence that confirms the Earth is warming because of human activity.

As many climate-change deniers have proclaimed, I, too, am not a scientist. But I can read, and I can reason — and so can they.

We all can use our senses also to observe the changing world around us. Summers have grown hotter and longer, winters milder and shorter. Ice-outs come earlier, if the ice forms at all. Ski centers like West Mountain struggle to hold onto snow. Saranac Lake can barely construct its annual winter carnival ice castle. The blocks cut out of Lake Flower, which used to be three feet thick, were about a foot thick this year. 

Sadly, the deniers took their argument to heart, as if being wrong about climate change was a reflection on their character., so they either dug their defenses deeper or avoided the subject.

The evidence of Trump’s unfitness for office also forms a “massive, interlocking structure,” from the testimony of small business owners he cheated to the more than a dozen women who say he sexually assaulted them to the failures of his businesses, constant lying, disrespect of military veterans, use of the presidency to enrich himself and his family, criminal conviction for falsification of business records, civil finding of liability for business fraud, civil finding of liability for sexual assault and stated intention to round up millions of undocumented immigrants, including those who have been living here for decades with their families, put them in detention camps and deport them.

The Curt Stagers of our politics are the people from Trump’s first administration whose loyalty soured with their observations of his behavior in office. Mike Pence, John Kelley, James Mattis, Cassidy Hutchinson, Miles Taylor, Mark Esper, John Bolton, Stephanie Grisham and many more will not vote for Trump and warn others against doing so.

They did the field work of watching Trump up close as he went about the job of being president and concluded he is unfit.

I used to say of climate change deniers: “The water will be around our necks before they admit they’re wrong,” but that was incorrect. The water will be over our heads first.

Trump’s supporters likewise hold him closer the more his lack of character is revealed.

Donald Trump loves to mock green energy and other efforts to counteract climate change. He welcomes the deluge, and, sadly, we welcome him.

History

Part of the Trump effect is a rewriting of history, creating a version that is incorrect but better suited to the current purposes of the Republican Party. I was alerted to an example of this on Saturday by Heather Cox Richardson’s daily “Letters from an American,” when she talked about the GOP convention speech by Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancee.

“It is no wonder that the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy and faced down communism sadly say they don’t recognize our country anymore,” Guilfoyle said, toward the end of her speech.

But, as Cox Richardson, a historian, pointed out, one of the three great allies in World War II was the Soviet Union, a communist country that, with the U.S. and Great Britain, was fighting against the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy and against Imperial Japan.

Rage

Another aspect of the Trump effect is anger. Commentators have written lots of nonsense about where this anger comes from, often blaming people whose politics lean left: “the liberals made me do it.” I think one of the reasons his most ardent followers like Trump is because he allows and encourages the release of their anger and gives them multiple targets for it — liberals, immigrants, Democrats and, most of all, anyone who has prosecuted or, in his view, persecuted Trump. It feels good to have someone to blame for the frustrations we all feel, which is the irony of Trump — we liberals also rely on him as our anger catalyst, with him as our target.

This angry sign can be seen on Route 9N in Lake Luzerne. The small sign in the background at left points the way to Stuart M. Townsend elementary school.

Nature

Cole’s Woods seems to be a haven for dragonflies and damselflies, which I guess are not quite the same thing. I’m also not sure exactly what this little flying creature is, although, in the air, it seems to move like a dragonfly. When it alights on this log, however, and doesn’t move at all for several seconds, it seems more like a stick than an insect.

Hovey Pond, with its profusion of milkweed, should be a haven for monarch butterflies, and we did spot one on a recent afternoon as we circled the pond.

A monarch swoops close to milkweed along the bank of Hovey Pond on a recent muggy afternoon. Monarchs feed on milkweed.

Flowers

Glens Falls really has its flower act together.

Flowers soften and enliven the streetscape along lower Glen Street in downtown Glens Falls.

The Downtown Revitalization Initiative has accomplished much more than the construction (ongoing) of the market center on South Street, such as these attractive new sidewalks on Elm Street, which are set off in a lovely way by this large cement planter filled with flowers.