I can’t believe we’re all still talking about whether Alabama was ever facing any statistically realistic probability of being impacted by Hurricane Dorian. Apparently, it hasn’t rained in Alabama in almost two weeks. There was never a model that showed any likelihood that the storm would pass over Florida into the gulf and slam into Alabama.
However, since the NOAA branch office in Birmingham felt it necessary to avoid a public panic, they corrected the president when he said that the state should brace for impact. And now the national NOAA has criticized them for conveying accurate information to the people of Alabama.
The meteorologists are all miffed and atwitter over this decision, as it represents the triumph of bullshit over science. But bullshit triumphed over science in 2000 and 2004 and in 2016. This isn’t new.
It’s not that science says that a Democrat should win all presidential elections. It’s more that Bush and Trump were so indifferent to science that they undermined its principles and proved that making shit up is often more politically effective that speaking in reality-based terms.
At this point, Republicans are actively hostile to science and see it as an enemy. It is definitely not a problem that is isolated with Trump. So, while I agree with all these weatherpeople who pissed off, I also wonder whether they’ve been too busy looking at climate change and pressure systems to notice what the hell had been going on in this country.
Bush Sr didn’t manage to win against Voodoo Economics. Bullshit always has public appeal .
Meteorologists were actually surprisingly slow to come around to accepting climate change, with many of the (right wing) ones mocking and denigrating climate models because of the variability they saw in their weekly weather models. But the major associations have now all come around, and as far as I can see, the right wing weathermen are keeping their mouths shut on their denialism. On the whole, though, one can watch nightly weather reports until you are comatose and you will not hear one syllable about climate change. Same for the wall-to-wall hurricane coverage or multitudinous “Storm(s) of the Century” (i.e. every two years) stories.
Dorian-gate is really quite a big story because it makes crystal clear to any rational person that Der Trumper’s severe personality disorder is getting worse month by month. Like his idol Der Fuhrer, Trumper simply cannot be wrong, and he isn’t going to endure another round of “Washington’s 1777 Battle for Reagan National”. So reality has to be changed vis-a-vis Hurricane Dorian. As an infallible reality denying egomaniac, Trumper was correct that Dorian was headed straight for Alabama. And Der Trumper’s supporters agree, because white is black if that’s what their Glorious Leader says. That is what fascism is all about.
The other big aspect to this is that Der Trumper clearly and openly ordered a national agency to violate its stated policies and yap National Trumpalist bullshit instead. That this was a scientific agency makes the matter all the worse. It shows that there is no executive check on Der Trumper’s madness whatsoever and he can simply dictate to federal agencies what to do and say, even if it means denying reality. This means we have a real Nazi government on our hands, with agencies knowing that they have to “work towards the Fuhrer” or else. If anyone thinks that the patriotic preening generals of the Pentagon will somehow behave differently than the NOAA front office when push comes to shove, they are deluding themselves.
Just more grist for the Dem House Investigation Teams, but they are moving slower than a snail’s pace and Der Trumper and his WH sycophants haven’t the slightest concern about them.