BY: LEIGHTON SCHNEIDER, ABC NEWS
(NEW YORK) -- The United States experienced historic natural disasters last week, with unprecedented wildfires torching the West and the Atlantic hurricane season setting a record for the number of named storms at this point of the year.
Officials in California and the Pacific Northwest, as well as scientists, pointed to these natural disasters as hard evidence that climate change is a global threat and scientific reality impacting American communities.
Last Monday, President Trump pointed to forest mismanagement as one reason behind the fires and expressed skepticism about climate change at a press briefing after Wade Crawfoot, California's state secretary for natural resources, said people need to follow the science."It'll start getting cooler, you just watch," said the President"I wish science agreed with you," Crawfoot replied. "I don't think science knows actually," responded President Trump.ABC meterologist Melissa Griffin tells ABC's Perspective Podcast that the President is correct in saying that the weather will start getting cooler, but only because of the changing season's. "Winter will cool down and fire season 2020 comes to an end, and that's it. But then what about fire season 2021? When it does cool down, we seem to forget that [the next] fire season will be around the corner again and what's to say that the next fire season isn't going to be worse? That's the weather aspect, but when it comes to climate, nothing is cooling down. All of the scientific research, when it comes to our warming climate, just has these graphs going up," said Griffin.
The worst case for scenario for Griffin is humans don't do anything to stop or slow climate change. "If we don't do anything this just continues to exasperated itself each and every year. We keep seeing the climate, the global temperatures and the global ocean waters continue to rise. That is what we're really trying to avoid here, because the more that happens, the more we're going to see glaciers melting. We're going to see things that we have never seen in our lifetime before. It's almost a question mark. Who knows what's going to happen if this continues," said Griffin. Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
