From Sunday’s Los Angeles Times:

In 2001, a team of international scientists projected that during the next 100 years, the planet’s inhabitants would witness higher maximum temperatures, more hot days and heat waves, an increase in the risk of forest fires and “substantially degraded air quality” in large metropolitan areas as a result of climate change.

In just the past month, nearly two decades after the third United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was issued, heat records were busted across California, more than 3 million acres of land burned, and in major metropolitan areas, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, air pollution has skyrocketed. — “California’s climate apocalypse,” by Susanne Rust and Tony Barboza

The warnings actually came much earlier, as the story notes:

As one 1988 internal Shell Oil Co. document noted, “by the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation.”

“I’m only sorry that in 1989, I could not get an audience for what I wanted to communicate,” said Jim Hansen, a retired NASA researcher and early climate change scientist, of testimony he made to Congress about the issue.

The Western United States is burning. We did too little, too late to avoid catastrophe. Yet, as we near the end of the second decade of the 21st century, the President of the United States is a climate change denier, as this exchange between POTUS and Wade Crowfoot, California Secretary of Natural Resources, shows:

THE PRESIDENT: … So, Wade and Thom, please.

MR. CROWFOOT:  Yeah, well, from our perspective, there is amazing partnership on the ground, and there needs to be.  As the governor said, we’ve had temperatures explode this summer.  You may have learned that we broke a world record in the Death Valley: 130 degrees.  But even in Greater LA: 120-plus degrees.  And we’re seeing this warming trend make our summers warmer but also our winters warmer as well.

So I think one area of mutual agreement and priority is vegetation management, but I think we want to work with you to really recognize the changing climate and what it means to our forests, and actually work together with that science; that science is going to be key.  Because if we — if we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians.

THE PRESIDENT:  Okay.  It’ll start getting cooler.

MR. CROWFOOT:  I wish —

THE PRESIDENT:  You just watch.

MR. CROWFOOT:  I wish science agreed with you.

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I don’t think science knows, actually.

 Thom …

Yet it’s not just the President. He has, with the collaboration of the contemporary Republican Party, systematically forced out or silenced scientists in government. Most recently, he hired a climate change denier for a top role in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as Hurricane Sally heads into the Gulf Coast states.

Add to this that at a time of a raging pandemic that has killed more than 194,000 Americans — and still counting, Trump has undermined the scientists at the CDC.

Listen in vain for objections from GOP leaders in the House or the Senate. Fifty days until November 3.