Ignoring science for profit will have deadly consequences for America

Some stains can’t be eradicated, no matter how hard you try. Lady Macbeth learned that lesson. It’s a lesson we are now learning in America.

Eviscerating an agency like USAID, which provides humanitarian assistance to some of the most vulnerable people in the world, is a national stain. A permanent blemish on the soul of a nation. Condemning USAID to “die” will affect millions who rely on U.S. assistance, in zones of famine, war, drought and catastrophe. Condemning USAID condemns countless people to die.

But shame and guilt, and decency and kindness, are apparently foreign to the new administration. Those are woke, antiquated concepts in MAGA world, where only money, power and influence seem to have meaning.

What’s next after removing the “ball of worms” at USAID? It involves consigning climate science to the dustbin of history — to a deep, dark memory hole. And why is such industrial-strength ignorance necessary? Because scientific understanding of the climate harms caused by fossil fuel burning is bad for business.

Let's say we do send America back to the Dark Ages, before scientists discovered that fossil fuel burning alters global climate. We just pretend it doesn’t exist. Pretend planetary warming isn’t happening. Pretend we know nothing about the causes of warming. Cut funding for research. Kill information that reveals how the poor and those of color suffer the most severe impacts. Let’s Make Ignorance Great Again!

We can try to ignore what’s happening, but climate change is real. It affects all of us, in every aspect of our lives. Befouling the atmosphere by using it as a convenient “unpriced sewer” for our carbon pollution has already altered global climate. Human actions are already warming the atmosphere, the land and the oceans, raising sea levels and altering the properties of extreme events. Human-caused climate change is already influencing our health. Where we can live. Our access to fresh water and secure food.

Like the demise of USAID, the demise of federally funded climate science will have severe consequences. We will be less aware of the true risks of climate change. We will make poorer decisions on how to adapt and respond. More lives will be put in harm’s way. More will die.

In 1967, Professor Suki Manabe published a paper in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. The paper was coauthored with Richard Wetherald, a colleague of Manabe’s at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton. The research used a simple climate model to predict how atmospheric temperature would respond to large increases in carbon dioxide.

Manabe and Wetherald showed that doubling or tripling preindustrial CO₂ levels would lead to fundamental changes in the vertical structure of atmospheric temperature. In simple terms, heat would be increasingly trapped in the lowermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere — the troposphere. The layer above the troposphere — the stratosphere — would cool.

This prediction proved to be right. Satellite temperature measurements have confirmed significant warming of the troposphere and cooling of the stratosphere, sustained over decades. No natural causes can produce this distinctive fingerprint. It’s our fingerprint: the fingerprint of human-caused fossil fuel burning.

It’s important to note that Suki Manabe and Dick Wetherald worked at an institution run and funded by NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Many of the satellites used to monitor changes in atmospheric temperature are NOAA satellites. One of the premier computer models now used to study climate change is a NOAA model. Like USAID, NOAA is now a target for death by a thousand cuts.

Today, in MAGA world, the research in their seminal 1967 paper might not have been performed. An evidentiary record of human-caused tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling might not exist. “Woke” NOAA computer models would not make troubling climate projections.

Such dire prospects should be of deep concern to every American. We cannot allow climate science to become “samizdat” — secret, illicit knowledge that may not be spoken of for fear of angering the MAGA president.

I don’t want the stain of willful ignorance to tarnish America for generations. I want our country to act as leaders in solving a problem for which we bear primary historical responsibility. I want America to be part of a community of nations working toward the common goal of maintaining a stable climate system.

We are at Elon Musk’s infamous “fork in the road,” but we’re not at the fork that he envisages. The fork we face is the choice between science and ignorance, between climate stability and climate carnage, between democracy and dictatorship. Between bright hope and dark despair.

If we do not choose wisely, we will betray the sacred trust of our children and grandchildren. They entrust us, as each new generation does, to make the world a better and safer place. We cannot sell out their climate future for the continued profits of powerful business interests.

Ben Santer is a climate scientist and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow. He served as convening lead author of chapter eight of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Second Assessment Report and was a contributor to all six IPCC scientific assessments.

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