The Great Leap Backward

Donald Trump has promised to make America great again. He is doing this in several ways. He just announced a funding cut (over a billion dollars) to the National Institutes of Health. We can go back to the days when if you get sick, the doctors won’t know what to do, and you can just go home and die.

Another way Trump is making America great again is by sending us back several decades to the time when all of our energy requirements come from coal and oil. I am sure that the massive campaign contributions from coal and oil companies is simply a coincidence. Most industry and most people want clean energy, but the coal and oil companies do not. America is one of the leaders in developing new clean energy technology. This is about to end, and doesn’t China know it. China is actually happy about Trump’s decision because it means that China will become the supreme leader in the energy of the future. It is almost like a president saying that we will resist this new internal combustion technology and focus our regulations to ensure that horses continue to dominate our transportation sector.

But clean energy technology has an irreversible momentum. There is no way to stop it, no matter how much Trump tells us that solar and wind energy are from the Devil. People want it, industry will continue to invest in it despite federal government threats. In addition to being good for the Earth, it is superior technology. This point was made in an article published in Science by someone you’ve all heard of.

The climate denialists—among whom there are very few scientists—will now have a meeting at which they will proclaim that all scientists who study global warming are traitors to America. The meeting will be chaired by Texas Republican representative Lamar Smith, who is famous for having said that he saw no evidence for global warming. The democratic staffers piled up papers of evidence in front of him, but he didn’t even look in that direction, so he still has not seen the evidence. Just about the only scientist they can find to defend the denialist theory is John Christy, an atmospheric scientist from the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Christy has made it clear that his opposition to global warming science is based on his reading of the Bible—which, by the way, he is reading incorrectly. Here is a report from Science magazine about this upcoming meeting.

Thank you, President Trump, for leading us boldly into the twentieth century. Next up, the nineteenth century!

How to COMPETE

I have introduced Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) in this blog before. I showed you a photo of him not even looking at the pile of scientific articles that proved his assertion, that there is no human effect on global warming, to be wrong. He did not even look at the pile of papers.

Smith is the chairman of the House Science Committee, which is preparing the America COMPETES reauthorization act of 2015. The previous versions of this act (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science) in 2007 and 2010 enjoyed bipartisan support, but Smith has turned it into a sounding board for his extreme anti-environmental views. The purpose of the act was to support science so that America can compete in the world marketplace. If Smith has his way (and he might; the bill passed the House on May 20) this bill will make America competitive the same way the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand is competitive. (By the way, ostriches do not actually do this except when digging holes to lay their eggs.) According to Science magazine on April 24, Smith’s proposals for science funding are within 20 percent, up or down, from President Obama’s funding requests, except for three areas. Those areas are:

• Department of Energy renewable and efficient energy: down 56%
• Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy: down 57%
• National Science Foundation Social and Behavioral Research: down 58%

Smith’s priorities (and those of most Republicans in Congress) are plainly obvious from the first two of these numbers: he does not want any research and development of new technologies that might reduce our burning of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels mean money which means campaign contributions. Christian fundamentalists, who adore Smith and his fellow Republicans, also hate the science of global warming, as I have written previously. Fundamentalists may also feel threatened by social and behavioral research.

It is clear that Congress is driven entirely by corporate money and not at all by verifiable information. Surprised, anyone?

Charge, Y'all

I think it was 1977. I remember watching President Jimmy Carter on television giving a speech about how America needed to conserve energy and develop energy-efficient technologies. The main reason, back then, was to lessen our dependence on middle east oil. The first oil embargo had just occurred the previous year. No one thought much back then about the problems associated with domestic production and export of American oil overseas, or global warming. This was still eleven years before James Hansen’s testimony to Al Gore’s committee in the Senate. Carter made a convincing case regarding a crucially important issue. True, back then there wasn’t much we could do—solar energy and generation of methane from cow manure were just in their infancy—and the message most of us took away from Carter’s speech was that we should put on sweaters at home in the winter (as Johnny Cash told us) and not put up Christmas lights.

Jimmy Carter was and is a nice guy, and understands the important issues. What he had trouble doing was stirring us up to take the initiative. One of the networks wanted to have a response right after his message. Today, news channels wish to have Republican extremists say how badly Barack Obama’s proposals will lead us down the path to communist dictatorship. But back in 1977, this network (I forget which) chose to have a mild and good-natured response to Jimmy Carter from cartoonist Pat Oliphant. Oliphant drew a cartoon during the speech and showed it on television right afterward. In the cartoon, Carter was dressed in a Civil War uniform, held up a sword, and said, “Charge, y’all.” The message was that Carter was right but had failed to inspire us to charge against the enemy, which was our waste of energy.

I fear that much of the scientific work on global warming has a similar effect. A recent issue of Science (August 2) had a whole section devoted to climate change. (You can search for issues and articles here.) As I looked through these articles, I got the feeling that they were saying the same things over and over that have been said for years. The article by Noah Diffenbaugh and Chris Field presented results of yet another computer simulation that said global warming is now occurring at the same magnitude that it has at any time during the last 65 million years, but a thousand times faster. This is causing distribution ranges of species to shift by up to a kilometer per year. Almost all land areas are already experiencing more extreme heat waves, droughts, and storms (more frequent and more intense). These are extremely important things. But I have heard them before and they were presented in cool scientific precision. The article by Craig Moritz and Rosa Agudo indicated that many species will become extinct from global climate change, unless they are generalists or unless they find refugia. Once again, a good article but nothing particularly new. The article by Tim Wheeler and Joachim von Braun indicated that climate change could disrupt food production in certain areas, particularly those areas that already have food production vulnerability, where even short-term disruptions could cause massive problems. They concluded that we need to invest in agricultural systems that are resilient to climate change. This sounds like Lester Brown in 1995 to me.

These were great articles, but somehow they seemed to me like the prolonged and painful contemplation of the obvious.

We say the same things over and over, with new data and models, and we say it in dispassionate terms, so that climate change deniers cannot call us alarmists. But consider these two things. First, the climate change deniers call us all alarmists no matter what. They consider Chris Field, not just Bill McKibben, to be an alarmist. Second, the conservative leaders of the House and Senate simply ignore everything we say. I mean this literally. Texas Representative Lamar Smith (guess which party) wants to change the peer review process, fearing that scientific research is straying too far from the conservative agenda. He called his proposal the “High Quality Research Act,” implying that the (to him) dismal quality of American research would be improved if we all did the kind of research that the Heartland Institute does. See Science, 3 May 2013, page 534. Furthermore, Lamar Smith believes that we have no need for Clean Air Act regulations. Democratic lawmakers got hold of a stack of scientific papers that demonstrated the need for such regulations in the interest of public health. Smith simply ignored them. This photo, provided by the Democratic staff of the House of Representatives, appeared in Science on 9 August 2013, page 604. Smith simply acted as if the papers were not there.

            This is not the worst example. The North Carolina state senate voted that the rate of sea level change should be calculated in a linear, not curvilinear, fashion. That is, they were telling the ocean to not rise any faster in the future than it is now. They are delusional.

            So what should we do? We could write more scientific articles. I am about to start work on one myself, about earlier budburst in deciduous trees associated with warmer temperatures. But we can write yet another pile of scientific articles, and conservative lawmakers will once again just pretend that they are not there, and then, like old King Canute, order the sea to not rise (as in this image from James Baldwin’s Fifty Famous Stories Retold).

But scientists already know about global warming, and the opponents will just ignore our work. We already know enough to know what to do. I’m not sure if I’m ready to go out and get myself arrested during a protest like Bill McKibben or, for that matter, like James Hansen (see Science, 3 May 2013, page 540). But I am certainly going to do more than lecture my students about global warming. I have started requiring them to calculate their carbon footprints and compare them with people from other countries. When it gets personal, they might take notice.