It’s hard to know how to respond to something as catastrophic and frightening as Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord today. On one hand, it was designed to be something that couldn’t be done rashly, and so Americans will have four years to argue over this, to hopefully vote along environmental lines, and to rally their city and state legislatures to do everything possible to counteract Trump’s short-sightedness. On the other hand, we are far past the turning point of irreparable harm to the planet already, and the notion that we’re still arguing over whether or not to even do anything at all does not bode well for us. Trump’s decision today will be enacted slowly, but the nature of climate change is that it is a slow-moving apocalypse. That’s what makes it so frightening, and also what makes you want to scream at the people who would do nothing about it.
For its part, The Weather Channel is doing the closest thing to a scream, responding to today’s developments with a full-homepage troll of the president:
The linked articles go on to detail the specific political ramifications of leaving the Paris accord, the decimation of the pine barrens, a longform exploration of the effects of warming waters on lobster populations, a rebuttal to the widely held belief that middle America will somehow be spared from the destruction of the planet, an extremely timely update on the enormous crack presently tearing apart Antarctica, a video update on the fact that the poles are turning green, visual evidence that California’s coastline is being eaten by the rising ocean, and, finally, video of our president, deciding that none of that shit matters.
Many of these articles are surfaced from deep within The Weather Channel’s archives, implying that it is not fucking around with this shit. It is only a matter of time until he declares weather itself a liberal construct and forces Sean Spicer to renounce all conversation about the weather as fake news. Last December, the once-stoic weather resource was forced to wade into the shit to renounce Breitbart, implying that the anthropocene will be marked not just by radical shifts in the Earth’s temperature and weather patterns but also by staid informational resources like The Weather Channel and the fucking dictionary lacing up their boxing gloves to knock the shit out of the luddites intent on watching us all boil.