Denial Ain’t a River: The New York Times reports that government climate scientists are worried that the Trump administration will bury a discouraging new report that says recent decades have been the warmest in 1500 years and the effects of climate change are being felt right now.

The report, which counters the climate-denying line of the Trump administration, is part of the National Climate Assessment, required by Congress every four years.

The report surveyed the entire country, but some of the most alarming news comes from the polar extremes. The draft report says, “It is very likely that the accelerated rate of Arctic warming will have a significant consequence for the United States due to accelerating land and sea ice melting that is driving changes in the ocean including sea level rise threatening our coastal communities.”

The report lays the blame for most climate change on human activity, the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But the report must be approved by 13 government agencies, one of which, the Environmental Protection Agency, is run by Scott Pruitt who does not believe C02 helps warm the climate.

The Guardian reports that over at the agriculture department employees have been instructed to avoid using the terms “climate change” and “greenhouse gases.”

In a February email, Bianca Moebius-Clune, director of the Agriculture Department’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, told employees to use “weather extremes” instead of climate change. Instead of “reduce greenhouse gases,” she instructed, use “build soil organic matter” or “increase nutrient use efficiency.”

Somebody please try to use that in a sentence.

Declining Numbers: A new CNN poll puts President Trump’s job approval rating at 38 percent, and his credibility even lower. Only 24 percent of Americans “trust all or most” of what they hear in official communications from the White House, while 30 percent say they trust “nothing at all,” according to the poll.

Revenge of the Hermit Kingdom: North Korea issued a series of outraged reactions yesterday to the new United Nations sanctions placed on the country for its recent ballistic missile tests, threatening retaliation against the US, “thousands of times” over.

North Korea’s official news agency said in a statement, “There is no bigger mistake than the United States believing that its land is safe across the ocean.”

Foreign minister Ri Yong-ho said in a statement, “We will, under no circumstances, put the nukes and ballistic rockets on the negotiating table.”

The statement also said, “Neither shall we flinch even an inch from the road to bolstering up the nuclear forces chosen by ourselves unless the hostile policy and nuclear threat of the U.S. against the D.P.R.K. are fundamentally eliminated.”

The Obit Page: Former major leaguer Don Baylor, who played 19 seasons of professional baseball while mastering the arts of hitting and getting hit, has died at age 68 of multiple myeloma.

Baylor won the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award in 1979. Over the years he started to crowd the plate, leaning over the strike zone and daring the pitcher to hit him with the ball. Many pitchers did exactly that, and when you get hit, you get on base. Baylor held the record for getting hit 267 times when he retired in 1988.

He wrote in his 2016 book about the 1986 Red Sox, “My first goal when I go to the plate is to get a hit. My second goal is to get hit.”

Google This: The author of an internal memo about sexual bias and under-representation of women in tech jobs at Google that went viral over the weekend has been fired. The memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” 

argued that the under representation of women in tech and leadership jobs is not because of bias but rather biological differences. A software engineer wrote that, “The distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”

He then went on with pages of armchair psychology and biology about the differences between men and women.

One quality he noted in women: “Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.”

There are definitely biological differences. No woman would have been stupid enough to write this memo.

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