According to a report this year by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, only 17 percent of Americans understand that nearly all climate scientists agree that human-induced global warming is happening.

In another report, Yale surveys found that while 85 percent of Democrats think global warming is affecting the weather and 60 percent say they personally experience climate change, only 42 percent of Republicans think warming is affecting the weather and a mere 22 percent say they experience climate change.

Similarly, a poll this year by Reuters/Ipsos found large differences between Democrats and Republicans on whether the weather was getting worse. While 66 percent of Democrats said hurricanes were getting worse, only 40 percent of Republicans thought so. Reuters said, "The divergence shows how years of political squabbling over global warming—including disputes over its existence—have grown deep roots, distorting the way Americans view the world around them."

The cumulative havoc hurricanes have wreaked upon the United States and its island territories in the last 15 years makes it the height of presidential irresponsibility for Trump to distort reporting about the weather itself. Predicting the path of catastrophic and potentially fatal storms is tough enough for people who train all their lives to save our lives and property.

Galileo once said, "In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." This episode proved the opposite. In questions of a hurricane, the authority of a rogue president should not supplant the storm tracks compiled by hundreds of humble meteorologists working behind the scenes.

Unlike this particular president who is blowing away the credibility of the White House with his Category 5 falsehoods, the scientists at the National Weather Service are there in the search for shared truth. Hopefully, they can weather this current storm, because we will sure need them for the next one.

Derrick Z. Jackson is on the advisory board of Environmental Health Sciences, publisher of Environmental Health News and The Daily Climate. He's also a Union of Concerned Scientist Fellow in climate and energy. This post originally ran on the UCS Blog and is republished here with permission.

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