Just because you — you scholar, you — have decided to stop studying something, doesn’t mean it’s going away.
When that lovely peacenik Pete Seeger — later echoed by Laura Nyro — sang “I ain’t gonna study war no more,” it didn’t mean war was over.
Yes, I’ve always thought it was a little weird that we actually have a National War College, where the military scholars go to study war, but it’s probably more realistic than weird.
The colonels who teach there aren’t going to get rid of war anymore than the folk singers are, but it’s not them prolonging war. War is, sadly, quite apparently in human nature. Probably, we shouldn’t ignore it.
But on his 99th day in office, just to kind of give the coup de grace to the two-figured counting of dismal days, President Donald Trump fired on the order of 400 scientists who for the past 25 years have been, by congressional order, compiling the National Climate Assessment.
So, by his way of thinking, if thinking is what he really does, the clear and present dangers to Americans presented by climate change are just going to go away.
The report, issued every few years, is not some kind of whoo-woo middle finger to Big Oil or Big Coal. It’s a matter-of-fact primer for how rising temperatures and stronger weather systems are going to affect the United States economy. Its five assessments over the last quarter-century are used to help the nation’s farmers, fishers, transit builders, weather forecasters and health-care professionals, among others, figure out how climate change is going to affect them, and how those effects can be mitigated. Local municipalities use the report to understand how heat waves, floods and droughts will affect their residents. The next report was scheduled for 2028.
Last Monday, however, the researchers who had begun work on the sixth climate assessment got an email telling them that the scope of the report “is currently being re-evaluated” and that all contributors are hereby dismissed.
“We are now releasing all current assessment participants from their roles,” the email said. “As plans develop for the assessment, there may be future opportunities to contribute or engage. Thank you for your service.”
Why, you’re so very welcome.
We’ve actually been here before, but it didn’t work out for the first Trump regime, although it did its best to hide the science from the people in the service of … what is it that climate denialists think they’re buying? Time to stumble on and leave the stinking mess to those who’ll remain when we’re dead and gone, I suppose.
“During Mr. Trump’s first term, his administration tried, but failed, to derail the National Climate Assessment,” The New York Times reports. “When the 2018 report came out, concluding that global warming posed an imminent and dire threat, the administration made it public the day after Thanksgiving in an apparent attempt to minimize attention.”
The good businessmen of the previous White House didn’t want anyone seeing the report’s data-driven conclusion that climate change would destroy about 10% of the nation’s economy by the end of this century, I’m guessing. The once and current president can continue to pretend that climate change is a figment of the imagination of Sierra Club do-gooders, but the economic assessment was actually the conclusion of 13 different federal agencies.
This, of course, is all about the mind, if you want to call it that, of a president who, whenever there is a cold snap in the Northeast, coughs up the tweet, “Whatever happened to Global Warming?” But that doesn’t make his willful ignorance any less depressing, or dangerous.
Stay tuned for how this latest salvo in Trump’s war against the other branches of government plays out. Just as he ignores judges’ rulings, in firing all the climate scientists, he ignores an act of Congress. And ignores us. Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech, says of the report: “If I care about food or water or transportation or insurance or my health, this is what climate change means to me if I live in the Southwest or the Great Plains. That’s the value.” Or, if you’re the current president, you can just go stick your head in the (hot) sand.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].
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