“The next few years are probably the most important in our history.”
–Dr. Debra Roberts, Co-Chair of International Panel on Climate Change Working Group II, 2018
Use your zip code to check this handy voting guide and see how your candidates stand on the climate!
In case you haven’t seen them in the news, you may wish to be informed about a number of recent developments related to our shared ability to apply scientific knowledge and reasoning to our public polices, including those related to climate change. I’d also like to share a couple quick things you can do to show our leaders you are paying attention and you care. If you are reading this, you likely care enough to take 5 minutes of action this weekend (see bottom of this post).
THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THE EPA’S DISAPPEARING CLIMATE CHANGE WEBSITES
Check out the EPA’s climate change website that your tax dollars are paying for: click here. For the past 20 years and up until April 28, the website was, well, much more informative. Here is a snapshot of what it looked like on January 19, 2017: click here. The information was all about scientific findings. For example, that 2016 was the warmest year on record and that scientists have linked that fact directly to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions.
According to its archiving rules, EPA makes the January snapshot of the website available on its new “This page is being updated” page. However, it will not be updated and some critical links do not work. For example, as reported by The Washington Post, a popular youth-focused educational resource on climate change, comprising over 50 pages, is no longer accessible from either the archived snapshot page or the EPA’s main pages. In fact, it has become very difficult to find even using Google. As a public service, I’ll make it available here (as long as it remains in existence), so you can see exactly what scientific, EPA-developed content certain of our leaders evidently no longer want our kids to see: A Student’s Guide to Global Climate Change.
Here are excerpts from the EPA’s May 28 press release regarding the updating of its web-based materials related to climate change:
Do you smell something? It’s smoke, because this is the modern equivalent of burning books. Of course, the above signals the Administration’s intention to weaken or destroy the Clean Power Plan, our government’s current primary policy vehicle for complying with our commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement. But what should these policy deliberations have to do with the availability of educational content your tax dollars paid the EPA to develop about the scientifically proven facts related to climate change? Nothing, that’s what.
For more information, see the website of the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, a group that has been tracking changes to public science and environmental sites.
REMOVAL OF SCIENTISTS FROM THE EPA BOARD OF SCIENTIFIC COUNSELORS (BOSC)
On April 30, the EPA dismissed about half of an 18-member scientific board. The function of the board is to provide independent peer review of the work of EPA scientists to help ensure EPA policies are underpinned by sufficiently rigorous scientific findings. According to an agenda of an April meeting of the board, among the topics discussed was, “the growing need for information on, and understanding of, climate change and responses to its impacts.”
The board is filled primarily with academic scientists who may serve two 3-year terms, their tenure after the first term having almost always been renewed. On April 30, scientists up for renewal were informed they had been dismissed. J. P. Freire, a spokesman for EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, said, “The administrator believes we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community,” and indicated he would consider replacing the dismissed academic scientists with industry representatives whose very industries the EPA regulates.
More changes at the EPA are almost certainly in the works. This fall, over a third of a larger and more important 45-member EPA Science Advisory Board are up for renewal. As reported in the Washington Post, a budget for that panel slates it for an 84% cut for 2018, citing “an anticipated lower number of peer reviews.” (Of course, peer reviews happen to be the primary way scientists ensure the continued integrity of science.)
Read more: New York Times, The Washington Post, Science, The Chronicle of Higher Education
SUSPENSION OF SCIENCE ADVISORY BOARDS BY THE DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR
Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, ordered on May 5 a freeze of the work of over 200 advisory boards, committees, and subcommittees that advise the Department on issues ranging from invasive species to threats and impacts from climate change. About a third of these bodies were reported to be science-based.
Read more: The Washington Post, CNN
OPPORTUNITY FOR ACTION: EPA REQUEST FOR PUBLIC COMMENTS DUE MAY 15
On February 24, President Trump signed Executive Order 13777, directing federal agencies to setup a Regulatory Reform Task Force to evaluate existing regulations and make recommendations about potential repeal, replacement, or modification to “alleviate unnecessary regulatory burdens.” Pursuant to that Order, the EPA is seeking public comments as part of its Evaluation of Existing Regulations. If you think we should keep existing regulations (like the Clean Power Plan) intended to empower EPA to create incentives for the adoption of carbon-free energy technologies and enable us to participate meaningfully in the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement, please take a couple minutes to make a comment. All comments must be submitted by next Monday, May 15.
How to submit a public comment:
Your comments can be short – even one sentence. Here is what I submitted: JPG.
OPPORTUNITY FOR ACTION: TRUMP ADMINISTRATION DELIBERATIONS AND UPCOMING ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT THE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT
The Trump Administration has reportedly been deliberating about whether to withdraw from or weaken the United States’ CO2 emission reduction targets under the Paris Climate Agreement. (Read more.) If you have been following any of the science-based content of rescuethatfrog.com, I hope you are convinced that withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement by the United States would be a disaster for all of us not exclusively interested in the short-term profits of the fossil fuel industry. Likewise, weakening our targets would be shameful and dangerous. The consensus among scientists is the Paris Climate Agreement is both our best hope and inadequate, as it is, to avert substantial environmental damage from global climate change. (Read more in the MIT Technology Review.)
Here is a letter I wrote to the President yesterday about these deliberations: Word, PDF.
Please consider taking a few minutes to write a letter or email of your own. To email, go to this website: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact.
The Administration has signaled its intention to announce a decision soon.
#rescuethatfrog
In Episode 4 of my history of evidence related to Global Climate Change, I wrote about the Keeling Curve, a continuous record of the global atmospheric CO2 concentration that has been measured on the side of a volcano at Mauna Loa, Hawaii from 1958 to today:
The blue data above is crucial to our understanding of humanity’s effect on our planet. It shows us clearly that the atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased by 40% since 1900. Meanwhile, the global average temperature has increased by 1.1 degrees Celsius since 1880. These two facts confirm calculations performed in 1956 by physicist Gilbert Plass (1956a, 1956b, 1956c, 1956d), that continued CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in the second half of the 20th century would lead to a temperature rise of about 1 degree Celsius by 2000, at which time we would experience readily observable effects of Global Climate Change. (Which we do.)
Given the blue data above and the measured temperature rise almost exactly equal to Plass’s predictions of the expected temperature rise from CO2 emissions, I think it’s pretty wise that we’ve been measuring this stuff. Do you?
An interesting story I didn’t mention in Episode 4 of my history is the fact that, but for the impassioned and persistent advocacy of Dave Keeling and other scientists, as well as timely decisions by individual government administrators at critical points, we could easily not have this data. At multiple times, the Mauna Loa observatory was nearly defunded by changing governmental priorities, as illustrated by the graphic below. You can read more about the continuous need for advocacy to keep the observatory going on the Scripps website or in Dave Keeling’s autobiographical account.
We are experiencing a new need for advocacy now.
Yesterday, President Trump signed into law the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, providing about a $19.5 billion per year budget for NASA (accounting for around 0.5% of the total federal budget). (Read more here.) The new plan for NASA is highly unusual, in that it makes no mention of earth science, including climate change. For most of us, NASA conjures thoughts of moon landings and space exploration. It’s important to know, however, that the study of our own home planet has been a core mission of NASA since its inception.
That is, since NASA’s inception in 1958, the exact same year Dave Keeling and other scientists began CO2 measurements at Mauna Loa. Coincidence? No. Both efforts resulted from the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year, a global effort to fund basic earth science. In fact, the 1958 law that formed NASA specifically called on it to bring about the “expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere.” Since then, even while it was sending folks to the moon and satellites across the solar system, NASA has executed that core earth-based mission under 6 Republican administrations and 5 Democratic ones. Until now, if President Trump has his way.
On March 16, the President published his proposed federal budget. It is brutal with respect to the global climate. If enacted, the plan would terminate both efforts to reduce American greenhouse gas emissions and diplomatic efforts to lower global emissions. Even more irresponsibly, this budget would defund our efforts to monitor the cimate. Read more here.
NASA’s planned Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE), Orbital Carbon Observatory-3 (OCO-3), Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), and CLARREO Pathfinder missions would be cut. Each of these satellite based missions is designed to monitor aspects of the earth’s climate, enhance our ability to predict changes, and help us prevent or adapt to those changes.
At the EPA, the President’s budget also would wipe out the Clean Power Plan, our current key policy vehicle for complying with commitments we Americans made at the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, an agreement signed by 194 nations to limit global warming to “well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.” (Basically, to do what scientists say we must in order to avoid massive consequences for the children currently living among us. And the clock’s ticking – we are already up 1.1 degrees as of 2016.)
In the State Department, the President’s budget would eliminate the Global Climate Change Initiative and eliminate all payments to United Nations climate change programs.
When asked about climate funding at a press briefing last Thursday, Mick Mulvaney, head of the President’s Office of Management and Budget, had this to say: “We’re not spending money on that anymore; we consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.” (See video). Take a look at the summary statements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, which I included at the appropriate time points on the blue graph above. They look increasingly desperate with time, right? In light of those conclusions by a large, international panel of scientists, please consider whether you think climate science is a waste of money.
For me, doing nothing on climate change, in light of the data at the top of this post, would be terrible, as it’s a policy that would put our own children at substantial risk and also cede any moral authority we have in the world. To do that, while at the same time ceasing to even monitor climate change, would be unconscionable. None of us, individually, would make such a decision. This is like texting while driving, trying to get a base hit with your eyes closed, or refusing to check your blood pressure when you know it’s high. We need to, at the very least, watch.
Who benefits from such a myopic policy? Who benefits from not even knowing what’s going on with the atmosphere we are clearly changing? Certainly not the people of Shishmaref (though they have become thought leaders on our problem). Certainly not the people of coastal cities like New Orleans or New York City (for whom Shishmaref is a canary). Presumably, we would prefer to have some warning before the coastal seawater is lapping at our feet.
The only people who would benefit from a policy of not even monitoring the environment are the executives of coal, oil, and gas companies who lack the imagination and courage to transition their enterprises to already-available, more sustainable technologies. Maybe they are building up their trust funds so their kids can move inland to gated communities protected from the deteriorating environment around them. Most of the rest of us have or know children who will need to live in the world as it is on average. On average, as we have seen, it’s getting hotter ever faster.
Fortunately, the President’s budget proposal is (so far) only a proposal. Congress ultimately determines the budget. It needs to be influenced now.
Please join me in encouraging Congress to fund the basic science needed to monitor the changing environment, as well as the planned EPA and State Department activities with which we must meet the Paris Climate Agreement commitments we made along with 194 other nations. There are tools to identify your House Representative and Senators on my Take Action page. Here are some example letters I have written on the budget proposal – feel free to copy if it helps you get some letters out.
#rescuethatfrog
Are my posts about Global Climate Change becoming a downer? I fear maybe they could be. Who wants to see photos of our majestic glaciers vanishing?
It doesn’t have to be a downer. It’s only a downer because we know we aren’t addressing the problem like we should (and could!) be. We wouldn’t feel so sad if we were busy erecting solar power plants, photovoltaic panels on our roofs, and wind turbines to guarantee ourselves and future generations access to a bounty of sustainable energy.
Please consider writing a letter or email to one of our leaders this week. I’ve tried to make it easy for you, with resources and examples, on my Take Action page.
More renewable, carbon-free solar energy strikes the Earth in just one hour than the entirety of humanity consumes in a whole year. When we build more oil pipelines, worry over “energy independence,” envision putting coal miners “back to work” at a job that kills workers, and find ever more desperate and carbon-intensive ways to extract fossil fuels from the Earth’s crust, we are suffering from a lack of imagination. (Hopefully a temporary one.)
We are the people who saw birds fly, and at Kitty Hawk we learned to fly, too, and now we can be anywhere on Earth in a matter of hours. We are the people who saw Nazism rise, and we rose higher to defeat it. We are the people who saw Sputnik rise, and we were walking on the surface of the moon just a decade later. We are the people who eradicated polio and any number of other diseases. We recognized a dangerous problem of ozone depletion and worked effectively to correct it. We have put a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket and made practically all of human knowledge instantly available on it. The power of our government, our companies, and our people to effect change is astounding.
To act, we must first recognize a need. That’s what the side-by-sides of vanishing glaciers are about. Then, we get to work solving the problem. Plans have already been drafted. We need only the will to act. And to demand action from our leaders.
I have begun writing our leaders. Did you know that, in 2009, President Trump and three of his children signed an open letter to President Obama and the U.S. Congress asking for urgent action on Global Climate Change? It was in the New York Times. Here it is. Read it – I couldn’t have said it better myself! You’ll find Mr. Trump’s signature 2 rows from the bottom. I wrote to President Trump about that. In my district in Wisconsin, I am represented by two of the most vocal climate change deniers in the U.S. Congress. I wrote to them also. I am focusing my first batch of letters on a subject with which I have become informed: the overwhelming extent of scientific consensus that we have a real problem.
Please consider writing a letter or email to one of our leaders this week. On my Take Action page, I have posted resources to help you do that. I have also included copies of my own letters. Feel free to copy and paste if you agree with what I said. As I continue communicating with our leaders, I will keep posting my letters and any responses I receive.
But my letters won’t be enough. We need an avalanche of letters to wake up this frog! Please consider joining me this week. And please pass this call on to your friends.
Let’s RescueThatFrog together.
