Ron DeSantis started a whirlwind media tour across the launch of his 2024 presidential marketing campaign with an interview on Fox News on Wednesday night when the governor outlined his misconceptions about local weather change.
Mr DeSantis was talking to former congressman Trey Gowdy, a conservative Republican who himself is a local weather change denier, in an interview with the conservative information community following his disastrous Twitter Spaces occasion minutes earlier with Elon Musk.
Gowdy started the dialog on the subject by bluntly noting that Florida had skilled “a number of hurricanes” — an announcement of the profoundly apparent — earlier than asking the governor for his views on local weather change and the federal government’s function in addressing it.
Mr DeSantis responded by appropriately noting that Florida was not experiencing a rise within the variety of hurricanes making landfall, and referred to the existence of these storms as a “fact of life” within the Sunshine State. He then swerved into denialism together with his subsequent comment, nonetheless, quipping that “people said when we had [Hurricane] Ian, it was because of climate change”.
“I’ve always rejected the politicisation of the weather,” Mr DeSantis stated.
The governor went on to say that he believed emissions could possibly be decreased by encouraging innovation within the non-public sector, and dismissed the need or effectiveness of presidency laws on that topic.
While the governor rightly famous that Florida just isn’t experiencing extra hurricanes making landfall on account of local weather change, the assertion itself is rooted in a misunderstanding of the problem. While some advocates for addressing man-made local weather change brought on by greenhouse gasoline emissions have incorrectly made that assertion, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has discovered that warming temperatures are contributing to a two-pronged development — the frequency of hurricanes is dropping world wide, whereas the typical depth (judged by the variety of class 3 storms or larger) is rising.
And there are different causes for Florida, surrounded by shoreline, to be involved about warming temperatures.
“Coastal areas will see continued sea level rise throughout the 21st century, contributing to more frequent and severe coastal flooding in low-lying areas and coastal erosion. Extreme sea level events that previously occurred once in 100 years could happen every year by the end of this century,” reads the UN panel’s report.
Mr DeSantis’s entry into the 2024 Republican subject was marred by technical difficulties that delayed the start of his Twitter Spaces launch occasion; the governor’s candidacy has obtained heightened nationwide consideration attributable to his longstanding standing as Donald Trump’s solely aggressive challenger for the GOP nomination, as judged by polling of Republican voters.
