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| Riverbend Medical Complex, Springfield, Oregon, 24 October 2018 |
T-13 Days
Autumn in America should not be a time of concern. Yet, here we are with what could be our driest fall season on record in the southern Willamette Valley, an election looming in which my Congressman is running for reelection against one of the most notorious anti-climate-science deniers on the planet, and trust in government, science, and media are at all-time lows. Can we do better? I have a few thoughts.
Thirty-one years ago this month, I defended my PhD dissertation at Oregon State University in Atmospheric Sciences – Diagnostic Studies. My 6 years of graduate study at OSU led me through climate diagnostics and modeling, turbulence and convection, an appreciation for data collection in the field, and ultimately developing my own numerical models of weather phenomena and routines suitable for weather and climate study. I also studied learning theory and higher education, to be better able to teach (a PhD minor consisting of 8 graduate classes in education baffled my graduate committee members, but I think it served me, and my students, well). I became a meteorology professor at a world-renowned academic institution (Florida State University), and worked across disciplines in fields as disparate as education, psychology, engineering, and hydrology, while still honing my mad weather, climate (and water) science skills. I am a climate scientist, atmospheric scientist, geoscience educator, fluid dynamicist, and sometime hydroclimatologist. I’ve trained hundreds of new degreed scientists and hundreds of math and science educators. I may be an old white guy, but I’ve long been a champion of diversity in science and society. And after 25 years at FSU, I moved back to Oregon, to a community college, where over 40% of our nation’s future scientists start their higher education careers.
1988 was my first year as a tenure-track faculty member, and while I was teaching general meteorology, synoptic meteorology, climatology, boundary layer meteorology, and atmospheric chemistry, I was also beginning my own exploration of this evolving science area of global warming and anthropogenic climate change. Work by Wally Broecker and Jim Hansen was revolutionary, and now, more than 30 years later, their “predictions” of future climate states are remarkably true, particularly given the infancy of our scientific knowledge and computing power at that time. I committed at that time to learn as much as I could, particularly to help blunt political partisanship that was already rearing its head. I remember meeting then Senator Al Gore at the 1991 American Meteorological Society meeting when he was our keynote speaker; we got to the bar after the event at the same time, and we spoke for about 10 minutes on the importance of getting his message out to educators, to help the teachers relate the science to the young people — they are our hope.
There are so many reasons for me, a husband, parent, grandparent to be hopeful for the future, because I see what the young people are doing today. I see the plaintiffs in Juliana v. United States working hard, I see students across the globe doing solid work in the GLOBE program (globe.gov) and other international environmental education programs, and I see my own children and grandchildren and their respect for our environment and the people who live in it. Despite the fact that I remain a very hopeful person, I write today regarding something substantively worrying about my America.
The USA today is a place of bifurcation. Bipartisanship has evaporated, and those few voices who have reached across the aisle have either departed the chamber with that aisle, or have retreated to what they view as the safer confines of cloak rooms and political money-machines. What were once reasoned voices who embraced the notion that science could inform public policy have retreated to their base, but in ways that are much more complex than party politics.
Democrats from coal-mining or gas-guzzling states are more concerned about environmental legislation that limits mining, or places restrictions on water, air, and soil contamination than they are with environmental justice. Ethanol affecianados in the midwest tout growing our own fuel, propping up the corn farmers and collectives, in what is arguably one of the worst possible plant-based solutions for ethanol. And those from auto-manufacturing states or states with high proportions of commuters are more concerned about maintaining low gasoline prices than they are about clean air, dangers of hydrofracking, transportation of bitumen from tar sands, or offshore drilling.
This does not get the Republicans off the hook, of course, either. They have almost in lock-step supported the Trump administration in its diabolical abandonment of principles of environmental protection for our lands, our biosphere, our air, and our water. Two anti-environmental directors of EPA, as well as those who lead the Department of Agriculture and Interior, have led to reversal of national environmental policy that has its roots in administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, among other Republicans who’ve supported environmental initiatives. These political appointees, supported by many in the Democratic party when they appeared before the Senate, aided by other appointees who do not require Senate confirmation, are dismantling regulations supported by their own agency scientists, hired competitively for their scientific chops, and not their political leanings. Many of them are speaking out and/or are leaving their agencies.
This national move had an experimental laboratory in state government in Florida, the state where I fully developed my own scientific credentials, thanks to competitive grant funding from agencies like NOAA, NASA, and NSF. I witnessed first-hand Republican Governor Charlie Crist send out marching orders to all of his state agencies to have a climate action plan. I worked directly with scientists and planners at the Division of Emergency Management, Division of Forestry, and Department of Environmental Protection, helping them to do their work. I worked with the Department of Education to adopt climate change and evolution in the K-12 science standards that the state adopted (rather weakly, as it turns out) in 2008. I trained many of the individuals who went to work for these agencies, and they worked to develop their action plans and consider and write regulations to support their scientific work and implement sound policy. I then witnessed the abrupt transition to the administration of Governor Rick Scott, who proceeded to dismantle sensible environmental regulations that were written with broad (at the time) legislative support. The transformation of the Florida GOP to a party of denial had been completed and has been amplified by Governor Scott. Many of the people who I worked with in these state agencies are long gone, in many cases having left because their agency just did not support their scientific (not political) values.
We are witnessing an age where truth is no longer respected, where outright falsehoods, lies, and make-believe numbers are shared by leaders, probably in full knowledge that these are false, but furthering their belief that if these are repeated enough, a drumbeat of support will develop. Scientists and science communicators are becoming unhinged as our work is ignored, mischaracterized, and maligned by a largely ignorant or uninformed public. Violence against your opponent (outside of the boxing ring) is now not only tolerated, but encouraged. I’m pointing at you, Congressman Gianforte. I’m pointing at you, President Trump. And I’m pointing at you, politicians in state houses and Congress, who are enabling this behavior.
You are also enabling a nationalistic tendency of America First across the world, and ignoring basic human rights principles of refugees, immigrants, indigenous populations, and right to thrive and live in a world which we, in America, are largely responsible for creating — one in which fossil fuel extraction and development, devoid of any rational action to curb deleterious impacts but only beholden to the profit motive, has for decades harmed the planet.
I’m lucky in some ways. I witnessed the 1960s and 1970s, an era when people cared about peace, and people cared about each other and the environment enough to lead to action. Those actions led to abandonment of a war on the people of Vietnam. America began to act to clean up the waters of our national rivers, to admit that we had been poisoning people who lived in our poorest communities with bad air and soil, and where clean-ups were noticeable, and the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. I spent a year in LA in graduate school in the late 1970s in times when the air quality was horrible, and I’ve been back enough times to see how clean air regulation has improved air quality there. We have witnessed how trace amounts of poisons can harm us, and science has shown us the way out. Now is not the time to roll these laws regulations back. It is not the time to blunt efforts to regulate greenhouse gases, and mercury and other toxics. The Trump Administration likes to claim that they are reducing unnecessary and redundant regulations. How long do you think our environmental efforts of the last 50+ years will continue to reap rewards if the polluters not only no longer pay, but they are allowed to operate without controls?
The election of 2018 is not one where Trump is on the ballot. And yet, he is a presence, as locally, regionally, and at the state levels, actions are often taken following partisan playbooks that seem organically-driven, but end up coming from entities such as ALEC, the Heritage Foundation, or Koch Brothers. Big oil, big sugar, big industry. They drive the agenda when they can, and the press often will be ignored as the veritable 4thestate does its best, but is monikered with prefixes such as the “Lying Washington Post” or “Failing New York Times” by people in power.
I am not sure the sky will fall if the Democrats don’t recapture the House of Representatives, seats in state legislatures or Governor’s mansions, but I can be sure of one thing, if bipartisanship and reasoned governance and international cooperation does not the ground running in Washington DC in January, we are destined to be further isolated, further scorned by our international partners, and destined to watch as other American nations, and the rest of the world trade and treat with each other respectfully, leaving us to become increasingly self-reliant, and relying on fear. Is that the America we all want? One where our military might and nationalistic tendencies govern what we do as a nation? To our people? To our environment?
Think about this before you fill out your mail-in, early, or in-person ballot on or before Election Day. What can you as an individual do to restore faith in government? Build and stock safe rooms? Prepare for rapture? Speak-out and act on things that you care about? Whatever you do, do it from a perspective of love and respect, if you can, and let’s not be the nation that is trying to bomb ex-residents of the White House and journalists (the new thing today, apparently). The voices of our ex-Presidents and their spouses, and those of the members of the 4thestate who are attacked at every Trump rally, may be our only hope for the future.
As George Carlin once riffed – Earth will be fine, we humans are screwed. Our respect for each other as humans, the flora and fauna around us, and our land, air, and water are all foundational to the better aspects of human evolution (“nature”). I would not call the political influences that characterize the Trumpist behavior and development “nurturing” — rather the classic debate of “nature vs. nurture” that makes us human seems to be careening towards fear-based individualism. We can do better. It started with events like the Women’s March, the March for Science, and People’s Climate March. But its roots are in social justice movements that began many decades ago.
Let’s keeping speaking, marching, and moving the bar forward, not backward to a paternalistic, racist, anti-science trope. Which I might call tripe.
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