The Hill reports: The head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said that talk about how climate change has played into hurricanes like Irma and Harvey is “misplaced.”
Scott Pruitt, who has expressed skepticism on the degree to which human activity causes global warming, told CNN that the country’s focus should be squarely on the immediate effects of the hurricanes for the time being.
“Here’s the issue,” Pruitt told CNN late Thursday as Irma was heading toward Florida. “To have any kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm; versus helping people, or actually facing the effect of the storm, is misplaced.” [Continue reading…]
Hurricane Irma Is One of the Strongest Storms In Historyhttps://t.co/qUv7I2em0j pic.twitter.com/xlRPcFeFrm
— Adam Pearce (@adamrpearce) September 9, 2017
It’s worth pulling this up in hi-res: you can see Irma, Katia, Jose, and ALSO the vast plumes of smoke from wildfires in OR, WA, and MT https://t.co/AQdzKStLdO
— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) September 8, 2017
There’s so much happening today in this view from NOAA’s new weather satellite, GOES-R. pic.twitter.com/31ZgmZ7I9l
— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) September 8, 2017
There are now 400 extreme weather events every year, four times as many as in 1970 pic.twitter.com/XU1JyOIehe
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) September 9, 2017