Meanwhile Outside...

Usually, sometime close to the beginning of the third week of any given month, NOAA (the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) will update their "State of the Climate" page with new information regarding how hot it's been getting outside.

I usually snag the report in a couple of days - like this one from October.

However, because of the Trump shutdown (now recently ended because Trump gave-in), all you can see at NOAA is this:

The website you are trying to access is not available at this time due to a lapse in appropriation.

NOAA.gov and specific NOAA websites necessary to protect lives and property are operational and will be maintained during this partial closure of the U.S. Government.

See weather.gov for forecasts and critical weather information.

This month is no exception.  Now that the shutdown is over, how long before the science reappears and how much damage did Trump's childish wall-tantrum cause?

In the meantime (a meanwhile in the meanwhile) there's this:

The U.N. system's chief scientist on weather and climate warned Friday that climate change has "a multitude of security impacts" and is increasingly regarded as a national security threat — with global warming records broken in 20 of the last 22 years.

This was during an open debate during the UN Security Council meeting.

Of course, this happened (from NBC):

But the acting U.S. ambassador, Jonathan Cohen, never even mentioned the words "climate change" or "security" in his council speech. And Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia objected strongly to discussing climate change in the Security Council, saying it is not a threat to international peace and security and should only be discussed in specific cases where it is a risk factor.

More than 80 of the 193 U.N. member states spoke at the day-long council meeting and virtually everyone except the United States agreed that climate change was happening.

You can see Ambassador Cohen's remarks here.

The "never even mentioned...'security'..." is not exactly true.  Here he is mentioning insecurity:

Many of our nations has experienced devastating natural disasters in recent years – from hurricanes to floods to droughts – affecting two billion people worldwide in the last decade alone. These events inflict loss of life, destruction of property, and displacement of citizens. They increase the risk of food insecurity and disease outbreak.

And:

Mr. President, Central America and the Caribbean have suffered greatly from the follow-on effects of natural disasters. Hurricanes have impacted national economies and created huge recovery needs. Recent droughts have exacerbated food and water insecurity and contributed to new migration flows in the region.

So there's that - but look how he framed his argument:

Many of our nations has experienced devastating natural disasters in recent years – from hurricanes to floods to droughts...

And:

Mr. President, we’ve seen how natural disasters can exacerbate existing vulnerabilities...

And so on and so forth. Notice that any notion of "climate change" has been seemingly scrubbed from the text.

So in a debate regarding how man-made climate change is exacerbating the world's security concerns, The Trump appointee instead stuck with the phrase "natural disasters" to describe those events. As if climate change had nothing to do with the rising temperatures, heavier rains, and thus could not be any sort of "risk multiplier" for already existing security concerns.

While he's doing great damage to this country, he's also doing great damage to the rest of the planet.