Bless all the souls in Houston, east Texas, and Louisiana who lost family members, homes, cars, cows, and livelihoods. May all the great efforts of neighbors and institutions continue to help those who were in harm's way.
But there is a lot more to the Harvey story than an extraordinarily destructive August hurricane: Climate change/global warming was behind the curtains of continual rain that fell and fell in unprecedented amounts.
I am writing to urge that my congressman, French Hill; our two U.S. senators from Arkansas; and Gov. Asa Hutchinson ask/demand that Donald J. Trump be impeached as an incompetent and dangerous president of the United States. Being a climate-change denier seriously degrades his capability to lead our nation.
I am a 71-year-old, sixth-generation Arkansan who knows in my gut that if Mr. Trump had chosen to run and had been elected as a Democrat, the current Republican-controlled U.S. Senate and House of Representatives would have already begun impeachment proceedings against him for his then-campaign's/now-administration's allegedly treasonous connections with Russia (the former Soviet Union), and the impossible to separate Russian/Trump interference with the 2016 U.S. elections. I think Mr. Trump would have not thought twice about running as a Democrat if he believed he could have won power that way.
However, I am specifically asking Arkansas' political leaders to act because of our sitting U.S. president's willful, continual denial of climate-change science and his implementing of damaging, far-reaching economic policies based on his flat-earth pseudo-science that global warming does not exist.
If America and our region ever needed an object lesson in basic meteorological science, Hurricane/Tropical Storm Harvey was this very harsh lesson. The Gulf of Mexico is the hottest in recorded history due to human-produced carbon in our atmosphere. The sun shines on that hot water every day in this "hurricane season" time of year, causing vast amounts of evaporated moisture to rise off the Gulf, which then, as in this current event, fell onto Texas as rain, rain, rain, unprecedented, heretofore impossible, amounts of rain.
Four feet of rain is not fake news!
Climate change is not fake news.
For all my adult life, the world's best scientists have been saying that unless humanity acts as if there is a tomorrow, we will heat up our world's atmosphere, melt the polar icecaps, melt the glaciers, start significant sea-level rising, create unstable weather patterns, more desertification, etc, etc. "The Club of Rome report" (1972, The Limits to Growth) shook the leaders of the industrialized world 45 years ago!
It is more than bizarre and unsettling to find myself now living in my own worst nightmare of how bad things could get from when I was an idealistic 25-year-old environmentalist living and working in Little Rock in the early 1970s. I thought then that our society had more sense and was capable of planning for a sustainable tomorrow.
I was quite wrong.
Last year the Baton Rouge area received 2 feet of rain in two days from the over-heated Gulf. Now look at what happened to Houston and, on the other side of the earth, Mumbai, India, by the increasingly heated Indian Ocean also creating endless extra moisture/flooding. These events and ever more increasingly unstable and lethal climate patterns will only continue to exacerbate unless/until humans in power learn to respect the most basic principles of science.
President Trump made up economic excuses/unsubstantiated lies (that happened to economically benefit the short-term bottom line of Exxon, etc.) when he pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord this June. His willful ignorance is currently endangering American lives, not to mention our potential to lead the world into an economically sustainable future.
DJT needs to go--yesterday. I would be proud if Arkansas' Republican leadership and the publisher and editors of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette led the way in asking for Trump's impeachment process to begin.
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Pratt Cates Remmel Jr. lives in Little Rock.
Editorial on 09/07/2017