I've been active with several projects related to climate and environmental change that affect Florida, where I now live. However, the commentary surrounding climate change I've read in the last few weeks has really bothered me, as I’m sure is true for many readers. I feel I should write about them now.
A New Yorker article entitled “The Other Kind of Climate Denialism”, opens with a photo of a landscape apparently devastated by a great fire--trees sticking up as stark skeletons against a befogged background. The caption under the photo reads: As uncertainty and denial about climate change have diminished, they have been replaced by similarly paralyzing feelings of panic, anxiety and resignation. The article itself, authored by Rachel Riederer, is prompted by David Wallace-Wells's new book, The Uninhabitable Earth. I haven't yet read it, but I'm given to understand from the New Yorker and other reviews that it paints a pretty grim picture of what awaits us. It begins, “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” That’s followed by several scenarios that would make anyone feel terrible. I wonder, though, whether books bearing down on a disaster theme will inspire readers to take actions that might mitigate the gloomy prospects. Wallace-Wells seems to think that fear can be a motivator to action. In an interesting TED talk, climatologist Katherine Hayhoe advocates a different, more engaging opening gambit for conversation. We can’t be sure, but any discussion that calls attention to a threatening future, that we have something to worry about, is welcome.
It's quite clear that attitudes about climate change are changing dramatically. Apathetic stances are being replaced by grudging admissions that something indeed is happening. But many still find it possible to hold the view that the future’s by no means clear—we don’t know how quickly change is arriving, or for that matter what can be done about it. That’s wrong, of course. The science on climate change is clear—we’re building ever more reliable forecasts as new data accumulate and the models continue to sharpen their focus. We can be pretty sure about the broad outlines of what’s coming, and roughly when.
But it's difficult to build a determination to take action when faced with consistent denialist pushbacks by the President and the largely unqualified appointees serving as his lap dogs in top agency positions. What sort of message is being conveyed to the American public when the Trump White House creates a panel to conduct an “adversarial” review of mainstream climate science literature and government reports concluding that climate change poses threats to the United States’ health economy and security? The panel is apparently going to be an informal group; I guess that it, therefore, won’t have to follow federal rules regarding transparency. But transparency about what? One can be sure that the panel will ignore every conclusion and estimate of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It’s to be led by White House aide William Happer, a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University who has pitched the notion that carbon emissions have become demonized. I don’t know much about Happer, but what I’ve read leads me to conclude that he has a warped sense of how science connects with other aspects of society. For example, In a CNBC interview, Happer said that “the demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler — Carbon dioxide is actually a benefit to the world, and so were the Jews.” All the scientists I know and admire would not speak in such terms. I’ve been a working scientist all my adult life, and I feel ashamed to even read such conflating of scientific results and proposals with entirely unrelated human sufferings from the past. Happer seems to have abandoned whatever professional commitments to the ethical and intellectual ideals of science he may have had.
The nonprofit organization Ecoamerica, in a recent American Climate Perspectives survey, found that 94% of Democrats, 71% of Independents and 64% of Republicans understand that climate change is happening. Those percentages are all up from a prior survey conducted a year or so ago. The survey also inquired as to where people go for guidance. It turns out that 63% of Republicans look most to scientists as reliable sources, 48% look to the president, 47% turn to environmental organizations and 44% to health professionals. It's laughable, though tragic, that Republicans responding to the survey are as ready to listen to advice about climate change from the White House as from environmental organizations devoted to collecting and disseminating reliable information about climate change. I wonder if these people realize that environmental NGO’s are heavily staffed by scientists.
Dav
Unfortunately, our challenges are broader and deeper than the thoughtless ruminations of this (hopefully) one-term presidency. Control of the executive branch has allowed the corporate conservatives and alt-right to wreak havoc with many of the regulatory agencies, in terms of both policy changes and management structures. There have been many appointments of outrageously unqualified people. Consider Trump’s candidate for Secretary of the Interior: David Bernhardt is an oil and gas lobbyist who worked to destroy endangered species protections for decades. As deputy secretary of the Department of the Interior under Zinke, he helped open our public lands and coastlines to mining and drilling. There’s been plenty of damage done at the federal level by appointees such as Bernhardt. But there’s also trouble at state and local levels. While the 2016 election put a good many more progressive legislators into the House of Representatives and state houses, many states still have substantial Republican majorities. The Washington Post has flagged over a dozen bills this year that represent threats to the integrity of science education. Many of these initiatives come at the behest of conservative think tanks, such as The Discovery Institute, founded in 1990. It gained fame by advocating that the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design be taught in science classes as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. Recently, the Discovery Institute has been associated with bills in state legislatures that would require that climate change and global warming be stricken from state science standards, or presented as an unsettled matter of science along with alternative views. The Heartland Institute, founded in 1984, is a similar not-for-profit organization. It maintains a website Climate Change Reconsidered. These conservative voices are using the same strategy they employed earlier in arguing that there are scientifically authentic alternatives to certain prevailing theories, notably evolution and climate change, and that these alternatives should be taught in the classroom. But as the eminent University of Illinois climate scientist Donald Wuebbles said with respect to climate change, “You can’t talk about two sides when the other side doesn't have a foot in reality.”
Though it’s too slow, change is coming. A recent online poll taken by the St. Leo University Polling Institute in Florida revealed that about 65 percent of respondents strongly agreed or agreed that climate change should be taught in primary and secondary schools. However, it’s just a telephone poll. Who’ll actually take the time to learn about climate change and what we can do to head off David Wallace-Wells’s harrowing scenario?
