Backyard and Beyond

Did you see Trump’s Coal Ambassador to the UN, Kelly Craft, say she believes “both sides” of the science on climate change? She and her husband, the Kentucky coal king, are major contributors to Trump’s campaign and inauguration. They also funnel money into his hotels, one of the major conduits of corruption flowing to the Trump Organization crime family. (His most fervent supporters in the Senate and House are also big spenders at his properties, with the pallid trollop Lindsay Graham as number-one bootlicker.)

Ah, “both sides.” Such inestimable damage corporate media has done with claiming to provide balance. 99.9-something % of the world’s scientists versus a handful of cranks is hardly balance. Of course, there’s rarely push back from the media to statements like Craft’s. Follow-ups like:

“Can you name one scientist or one peer reviewed study or one peer reviewed journal at all on the side that denies anthropomorphic warming?”

“Who actually makes up this side you also believe in?”

“What do you mean by “believe”?

“Or, put another way, how can you believe in two completely contradictory things at the same time?”

“Were you aware that scientists working for the oil, gas, and coal companies figured this all out half a century ago but their bosses chose to ignore them, bury the data, and fund the obscurantism and denialism you’re now peddling?

“Are you in the pay of the carbon industries …oh, that’s right, you are the carbon industry! Question withdrawn.”

Someone on their game — and Trump’s grifter scumbag crew are rarely on their game — might offer up the name of Bjorn Lomborg. But he doesn’t deny the reality of climate change, he’s just skeptical about what should be done about it.

I’m fascinated by the denialism complex. There’s the instrumental cynicism of the plutocratic funders of denialism, as they build their redoubts against radical climate transformations to protect their own, because they know what is coming. (I hear On The Beach will be remade in New Zealand instead of Australia.) There’s the denialism of Murdoch’s sluts; I don’t frankly know what they believe, but that’s immaterial; it’s what they perform. And then there’s the denialism of the serf-like supporters of denialism, parroting and serving their masters. Some of these folks have been brainwashed by religious and conspiracy thinking, which are not, after all, dissimilar. How well they fit the Trump cult.

Physics is complicated. The planet is complicated. The greenhouse metaphor, on the other hand, is not so complicated. But denialists aren’t looking at the evidence. They’re not actually making an argument against the science. They’re making an argument against science and rationality. They’re making an argument for rejectionist know-nothingism, militant stupidity, vicious irrationality. It’s all quite fascist, which is why it meshes so well with the Republican-authoritarian attack on democracy, as in the attack on the facts as we know them.

Check out Sarah Dry’s new book Waters of the World. There’s an absolutely fascinating century and a half of questioning, exploration, and experiment in the unraveling, per her subtitle, “of the mysteries of our oceans, atmosphere, and ice sheets.” A so very human achievement, flushed away by the epistemological nihilists.

Recently, I cited this April 1979 report, The Long Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate, from the Jasons to the DOE.

That same year saw the publication of Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment, by the Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate. It’s conclusion: “It appears that the warming will eventually occur, and the associated regional climatic changes so important to the assessment of socioeconomic consequences may well be significant, but unfortunately the latter cannot yet be adequately projected.”

Two years earlier, Frank Press penned this letter to President Jimmy Carter. He wrote: “The potential effect on the environment of a climate fluctuation of such rapidity could be catastrophic and calls for an impact assessment of unprecedented importance and difficulty.” Press served four presidents as a science advisor; he was director of Carter’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. The title of today’s post also comes from this letter. Carter was a fairly insipid neocon abroad and a neoliberal at home. His redemptory glow stems from his post-White House career. He didn’t do diddly about Press’s letter, or the other reports (noted above) during his administration, in fact, quite the opposite, and one assumes that that is what he will be remembered for in 2100, if anything.

Decades before all this, Svante Arrhenius made the first quantitative predictions for the greenhouse effect. (As analogies go, the atmospheric greenhouse is one of my favorites.) He was, of course, preceded by others. For instance, in the 1820s, Joseph Fourier said the Earth should have been colder than it was because of its distance from the Sun; he postulated that our atmosphere was an insulator. Ding, ding! Claude Pouillet finessed Fourier’s work in the following decade. In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote’s paper at the AAAS (being female, she wasn’t allowed to read it herself) noted that the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would effect temperature.

Charles Keeling, who died in 2005, gave his name to the Keeling Curve, which charts the CO2 build up in the atmosphere. This has been measured at the base of Mauna Loa since 1958. The NSF stopped funding him in the early 1960s, although his work was cited in their 1963 report on the increasing amounts of heat-trapping gasses. In 1965, LBJ’s Science Advisory Committee produced a big report on pollution, including the hazardous increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Some of the challenges in that report were met, even by the ghastly Richard Nixon. Before Trump, we’d done wonders to clean up our air, water, and food — but the atmosphere was left alone by the lot of them.

Today, a well-funded effort by the petroleum industry — whose own scientists were talking of all this half a century ago, — has sown doubt and confusion amidst the scientifically illiterate. (Speaking of which, did you see the news about the GOP Governor of Alaska demanding 41% evisceration of the U of Alaska’s budget: these fucks know ignorance pays off for them.) The fanaticism of true-believers in falsehood is manifest in the attempts to deny physics, and erase this science out of history. They’re doing this at Trump’s EPA, not Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

But hiding data won’t change the facts, or the effects of those facts. Those are proceeding apace.

Next Sunday: that time a two degree change in the global average changed the world.