Trump has already named climate denying, EPA-hating, fossil-fuel advocate Scott Pruitt to head the EPA. He’s put climate change denier Rick Perry, who threatened to eliminate the Department of Energy, in charge of (what else) the Department of Energy. Trump advisers are already indicating that he will scrap NASA's role in studying the climate.
And perhaps most ominously, Trump’s transition team is making a blacklist of scientists and bureaucrats who engaged in looking at climate change.
Donald Trump’s transition team has issued a list of 74 questions for the Energy Department, asking agency officials to identify which employees and contractors have worked on forging an international climate pact as well as domestic efforts to cut the nation’s carbon output.
For advocates of reason and science, Trump is like an asteroid whipping down from the far reaches of space. They can see him coming, but there’s little they can do but hunker down and prepare.
Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference.
With the Trump administration’s selection of Rex Tillerson wedding the US to a policy of climate change denial, official data on the state of the climate could soon become rarer than Arctic penguins. Scientists are trying to salvage what they can, and safely store it away, before the New Dark Ages fall.
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Trump’s cabinet choices may seem like a ridiculous set of selections from every quarter of Crazytown, but there’s one idea they all share.
In recent weeks, President-elect Donald Trump has nominated a growing list of Cabinet members who have questioned the overwhelming scientific consensus around global warming.
The selection of Tillerson is the keystone for Trump. As CEO of Exxon, Tillerson made a deal with Vladimir Putin that would lock up millions of acres of the high arctic for Exxon and ensure that Putin had the capital he needed to make any move he wants. Trump can make that deal happen.
The Tillerson–Putin–Trump deal is literally a world-defining agreement, one that will weigh heavily on every aspect of international affairs. It will define the role that both Russia and the United States will play in Eastern Europe, and perhaps in the rest of the world.
One key aspect of that deal is eliminating the Paris agreement and restrictions on carbon. To maximize the value of Tillerson–Putin–Trump, Exxon and Russia must be able to extract and sell Russian oil and gas for decades. The biggest enemy of the deal is anything, from regulations on carbon, to renewable sources, to plain old conservation, that limits consumption of oil.
Scientists have very good reason to fear that Trump will not only end the capture of new data, but place limits on the availability of existing information. House Republicans have already set out to persecute scientists who try to dispel the misinformation around climate change.
Climate data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been politically vulnerable. When Tom Karl, director of the National Centers for Environmental Information, and his colleagues published a study in 2015 seeking to challenge the idea that there had been a global warming “slowdown” or “pause” during the 2000s, they relied, in significant part, on updates to NOAA’s ocean temperature data set, saying the data “do not support the notion of a global warming ‘hiatus.’”
In response, the U.S. House Science, Space and Technology Committee chair, Rep. Lamar S. Smith (R-Tex.), tried to subpoena the scientists and their records.
Scientists can expect more “investigations” of their every action, including intrusions into their personal emails and personal lives. They can expect sources of data to be cut off, classified, or simply ended. They can expect sources of funding from the government to dry up, and sources from the private sector to fall under scrutiny and threat. They can expect universities to fall under funding pressure simply for having people on staff who believe in the scientific method.
But at least some of the existing data will be preserved. A seed for the future.