Last Wednesday, the same day the death toll from wildfires in California reached 83 people with hundreds more missing, President Donald Trump asked on Twitter, “Whatever happened to Global Warming?”

The president’s tweet, based on an unusually cold forecast, contradicts not only the most popular understandings of climate change, but it also dismisses the findings of a recent government report on the issue.

The report is created every few years and has linked the type of extreme weather responsible for the wildfires, particularly those which started in Northern California, to global warming, according to a Nov. 24 Associated Press article.

The California wildfires are only the most recent manifestations of climate change.

Hurricanes, droughts and cold fronts, such as the one Trump referred to in his tweet, have increasingly affected people across the globe, making the trend more difficult to ignore each year.

President Trump’s mishandling of climate change can no longer be attributed to ignorance. Through this report, the government has acknowledged the evidence for global warming’s detrimental impact on public health, safety, access to water, the economy and more.

For the executive branch to ignore research-backed, government-supported proof that the United States is in danger is irresponsible at best.The government is morally compelled to take action based on its own findings.

But the government has shown that it unlikely to follow through; it was over a year ago when President Trump announced the United States would be withdraw from the Paris climate accord, an international agreement meant to fight global warming, according to a June 2017 New York Times article.

In 2009, a legal decision was made that planet-warming pollution is harmful to human health and must be reduced by government actions, according to a Nov. 25 New York Times article.

We must hold the government accountable and make our voices heard to ensure that it uses its power in the interest of the people it represents, not the minority of business leaders who favor profits over the interests of the nation, the world and the future.

If the President continues to ignore science in favor of ideology, we will never be able to make progress as a nation. To ignore knowledge as it reveals itself is not only naive, it is immoral.

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