Denial

Since Jan 2017, the US seems to have reset right back to denying even the truth of “the earth is getting warmer, and we are largely causing it”.

In dozens of tweets spanning years till today, Trump has stated that climate change/global warming is not occurring, and indeed is an expensive hoax (I know Trump uses ‘hoax’ in a flexible way given that coronavirus is now also a ‘Democratic hoax’, but until clearer what he means by it I will assume the dictionary definition).

This is a tiny representative subset of such tweets through this period. A very large number of them are of the theme: “it’s cold today in <some location> therefore global warming is a hoax”. These obviously are just as absurd as “it’s hot today therefore global warming is true”, or "My wife is taller than me, so it can't be true that men are generally taller than women"

Regarding the one particular tweet: ”Earth cooling at a record pace” I have no idea what this was referring to. The link went to the general Environment page at The Telegraph (a right-leaning newspaper in the UK). The page obviously changes all the time, and the numerous climate change related articles at the time I looked (Fed 2020) didn’t seem to mention a lot of cooling going on! - summaries and links are below:

• The 2010s were the hottest decade on record and 2019 the second hottest year [1]
• Pyrenees glacier disappearing [2]
• Church of England’s plans to reduce carbon output to zero by 2045 at the latest, five years earlier than the Government's own target for the country, as part of their response to what the church will next month declare to be “climate emergency”. [3]
• An article on the tectonic shifting of market forces, and changes in the energy industry: “Companies that fail to take climate change seriously will go bankrupt and it could happen sooner than widely supposed”. [4]
• Article on reforestation/air travel tax proposals from the committee advising the government on meeting the UKs net-zero CO2 targets [5]
• Harm to seabirds from wind farms [6]
• Concerns around climate change leading to new refugees [7]
• An article of Florida Key residents having difficult selling, due to regular floods that the local authority cannot afford to prevent [8] How ironic - upon following a link from the president of the US dismissing climate change, I read an article in a UK newspaper highlighting suffering due to climate change back here in the US.

One thing that stood out in these articles, as compared to stuff I’ve been reading recently, is that they seem to have been written assuming the reader is a grown-up!

The tweet on “Climate Change” vs. “Global Warming” was part of a theme, given Trump tweeted on this at least 20 times in a period of 17 months around 2013-14 . Firstly, these terms have long been used in science literature - global warming refers to the long term warming trend of the Earth, climate change refers to...well...changes in our climate. For example, overall warming of the oceans might result in changes to the flow of warm ocean currents, meaning that areas of the world whose climate was previously moderated by those ocean currents no longer are, therefore their climate might change to overall colder temperatures (or get less rainfall, or more rainfall, or …). Both facts can be true - an underlying warming, and resulting changes. Certainly the science community, and most people, have no trouble understanding the meaning of these two terms, and given that ‘climate change’ is more all-encompassing to describe all the worrying effects of what is happening, that term is more generally used now (the site Skeptical Science has more background). The only evidence I have seen of a deliberate attempt to change terms is, ironically, from a Republican political strategist in a 2002 memo advising conservative politicians how to communicate about the issue, based on focus groups research to determine which terms to use to make sure voters would dismiss it as an issue ([9 page 8] [10]) :

It’s time for us to start talking about “climate change” instead of global warming….

“Climate change” is less frightening than “global warming”. As one focus group participant noted, climate change “sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.” While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.

Also from the same memo :

The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science

Such evidence of politicians not following science, but looking for opportunities to deny it, and manipulate us, I find truly disgusting. This memo was from 2002 - the scientific debate on the truth of climate change is now long closed.

Of course during this whole period of Trump’s tweets (and even prior to that), the US government’s own agencies were publishing their regular reports scientific reports showing the planets warming, the cause, and the resulting negative impacts.

The issue is similarly dismissed in speeches, such as this one in West Virginia [11], which included chants of “Drill, baby, drill” in response to Trump mention of coal, and his claims of media coverage not fairly accounting for his golf courses in assessing his record on climate change:

And the fake news – they never stop. They say Trump hates the environment. Maybe they should look at my golf courses, the most beautiful courses in the world. I’m probably the biggest environmentalist ever.

Trump also ridicules the use of green energy like wind power [12]

"If Hillary got in... you'd be doing wind. Windmills. Weeeee. And if it doesn't blow, you can forget about television for that night. 'Darling, I want to watch television.' 'I'm sorry! The wind isn't blowing.' I know a lot about wind. I know a lot about wind. [sic]"

He’s used this routine repeatedly. For example here at a CPAC, ridiculing the Green New Deal and wind power (“no planes, no energy, when the wind stops blowing that’s the end of their electric. Darling, is the wind blowing today, I’d like to watch television”)

Yet that is obviously not how wind power operates. Firstly it is part of an energy solution, secondly energy generated from wind power can be stored - our own Energy departments FAQ covers this. Or we should tell the Germans, who must be idiots, as in 2019, a quarter of German total electricity was generated using wind power, from an estimated 9.3% in 2010. [13]

Sometimes solar power also gets lobbed into the set of energy sources that aren’t feasible [14] - apparently solar isn’t “strong enough” . Again, this seems at odds with the fact that in 2018 Germany produced 8% of their power from solar [15] (and if it’s strong enough in Germany, it’s certainly strong enough in AZ & FL & TX...) , and the fact that China, in its move to combat climate change, added 4.5 times the solar capacity in 2018 than the US did [16]

He even claims that the noise from a wind turbine causes cancer [17] (the Whitehouse wouldn’t state the basis for this unusual claim). Here’s the video of that, followed by Danish MP Ida Auken teasingly offering an alternative viewpoint to this and all of Trump’s mocking of wind power [18] - Denmark now has increased the percentage of their electricity sourced by wind to 47% (in 2019).

He even tries to prevent other countries from using wind power, and legislated to stop Scotland from building a wind farm because he didn’t want to spoil the view from his golf course. After causing significant delay while it went through the courts, he lost, paid $290,000 in legal fees to Scotland, and in 2018 the wind farm went into production to generate ¾ of the power for one of Scotland’s largest cities [20] . And yet the Scots can also still watch TV.

Side note: Rather amusingly, as I went to the website of “The Scotsman” newspaper in researching this, an advert popped up promoting current news “Weather warning: Strong winds forecast for Scotland” - even more free energy!

Sometimes other aspects of Climate Change are added into this ridicule. For example, from a Pennsylvania speech in Dec 2019

“the damn wind just isn’t blowing like it used to because of global warming, I think. I think it’s global warming. Global warming, no more wind, no more life! The oceans are going to rise. One-eighth of an inch within the next 250 years, we’re going to be wiped out!”

It certainly does sound absurd that anyone would worry about 1/8th inch in 250 years! That’s because that figure is total garbage. The current rate of sea level rise is about 250 times that rate, and accelerating. So the projections for further sea level rise by the year 2100 - getting within the lifetimes of our kids - is somewhere up to 9-21 inches from today’s levels, not the 1mm that Trump would like you to believe.

From the reaction at such speeches, the number of times he repeats it, and the echoing of these views from his supporters, this message is an incredibly popular one with his base. I presume because it shows that the Democrats, who generally believe climate change is an issue and that alternative energy part of the toolbag of solutions, are idiots. Along with, I assume, the Germans, and the Danes, and the Brits, and the ….

Though somewhat confusingly, Trump has on occasion said climate change is not a hoax, though climate scientists have a “political agenda”. [21] However, he did not elucidate on how the 1000s of scientists in different countries around the world, both inside government and private institutions & universities, are somehow bound in this common “political agenda”. And more importantly, after making such statements as to the truth of climate change, normal service is resumed, and he returns to “climate change is a hoax, green energy a joke”.

Giving the scientific consensus around the basic questions of warming and it’s cause, I find it horrendous and indefensible that our own President continues to talk as if those facts are not established, that the scientists cannot even be trusted, and who ridicules sources of free, clean energy that other countries already are massively exploiting as part of their investments in tackling climate change. Indeed, I find this seeds my distrust in other areas - if for climate change the administration is clearly not acting based on science from our government institutions, and clearly not adopting policies good for the US long term, how can I have faith they are in other areas?

Deliberate information hiding

As well as the ongoing denial that climate change exists, there also appear to be deliberate attempts by the administration at hiding information.

Which day was chosen to release the 2018 climate change report (NCA4 [22]) discussed earlier (the one that projected economic damage if we continue down the track we are on)? Black Friday, the day of the year traditionally chosen to bury bad news [23] . When asked about it by alert journalists who still noticed the release, this 1500 page report authored by 300+ experts was dismissed in four words by Trump: “I don’t believe it”.

There is also something chilling (no pun intended) around the removal of “Climate Change” from the Environmental Protection Energy website. Go to the EPA website [24] today, and you’ll see a list of “Environmental Topics” [25].

You’ll also see the odd and unusual link at the top saying: “We’ve made some changes to EPA.gov. If the information you are looking for is not here, you may be able to find it on the … January 19, 2017 Web Snapshot”

Follow that link, and you’ll find a very similar looking page as today, but as it was in January 2017, when Trump took office:

Every single one of the topics that were on the EPA.gov website in January 2017 are on the website today: Air, Bed Bugs, Chemicals & Toxins, Environmental Information by Location, Greener Living, Health, Land, Waste & Cleanup, Lead, Mold, Pesticides, Radon, & Water. Every one - except Climate Change (so continue to worry about Bed Bugs, no need to worry about Climate Change anymore!). You can still find the information there if you search for it, just a deliberate attempt to bury it. So it’s not as if the role of the EPA changed, yet one of the very first actions, almost on day one, was to bury information on climate change.

Why is there a link to the Jan 2017 snapshot on epa.gov? Because, fearing this exact Soviet-like hiding of information, some citizens filed Freedom Of Information requests that then mandates preservation of the information.

But enough about words, especially as they seem to flip-flop between “it’s getting warmer” & “it’s a hoax” (with the latter being the more consistent, and the one echoed by supporters ) - what of the actions of this administration, and do they reflect my values as to the importance of acting on a coherent plan to address climate change?