An Ignorant Decision, Made by Ignorant People That Affects All Living Things
I have been a life-long environmentalist. I have co-authored three books on the Climate Crisis and I co-founded a global non-profit to face the issue 11 years ago. During the last 11 years at least, I have looked at the data coming out of the Mauna Loa station in Hawaii. It is regarded as one of the most important pieces in the existential fight to face what is going on with Spaceship Earth.
What I learned over the past weekend is that the Mauna Loa facility is probably going to shut down due to the DOGE cuts that Musk/Trump made to NOAA. For those of you that don’t know much about Mauna Loa, here is a good article from the NYTimes from last weekend .
In part this article explains the significance of Mauna Loa:
“The air swirls around the isolated outpost located on a Hawaiian volcano is a mix from all over the Northern Hemisphere. That makes it one of the best places to measure greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It is indispensable to scientists around the world.
The readings collected from Mauna Loa, starting in 1958, were used to create what is famously known as the Keeling curve. It’s an upward-swooping line that charts the steady rise of carbon dioxide over the past seven decades – the result of nations burning oil, gas and coal.
But President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget would put an end to Mauna Loa, along with three other key observatories an almost all the climate research being done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“It’s frankly inconceivable” said Lisa Graumlich, an emeritus climate scientist at the University of Washington and past president of the American Geophysical Union. People know and understand the “iconic” record, she said. “A lot of the science we do is incredibly complex, and this record is something that can be grasped”
The observatory is part of a global network of stations that monitor the atmosphere. The research performed at these labs lets scientists assess changes over the long term, figure out what caused the changes and make better predictions for extreme weather events like heat waves, droughts, and floods. And the stations can help scientists tell which climate policies are working, which are not, and if global warming is accelerating.
“Why, for relatively little cost, would we want to lose that ability?” Dr. Graumlich said”
To the title of the column, the absolute worst form of ignorance is chosen ignorance. If someone grows up with no education, family, and extreme circumstances, such as living in a refugee camp, well some level of ignorance might be expected. But to not want to be informed and choose ignorance is basically unfathomable to me.
Trump/Musk/DOGE/MAGA Party have eviscerated and are eliminating vast swaths of the U.S. Federal Government. There is a level of meanness to the effort and a political “philosophy” behind it. For some reason I do not understand, the former Republican Party, now the MAGA party, does not believe in the Climate Crisis. Therefore, they are doing away with much of the science infrastructure that has been in place for seven decades. If scientific arms of the federal government help us learn about the single greatest problem facing all living things, why cut it?
[I have had numerous conversations with those concerned with the climate crisis about why the former Republicans, now MAGA politicians seem to think that, as Trump said “Climate change is a hoax by the Chinese” how they came to this choice of ignorance. The only thing that several people think is the reason is that Al Gore ran as a Democrat in 2000 and a few years later he was all about “The Inconvenient Truth”. So, climate change is a message from the Democrats??? This is grasping for straws.]
The reality is that every single night I can turn on a network 30-minute newscast and actually SEE climate change. Fires in L.A./fires in Canada/ deadly floods/unprecedented rain/unprecedented number of tornados are all just Mother Nature, or Planet Earth responding to what we have done to her/it.
Whenever I heard – it has been years since I actually met a climate change denier though one sits in the White House- someone question whether “climate change is real” I always say, watch the network newscasts this week and you will see that it is real.
The observatory at Mauna Loa has been keeping track of GHG emissions since 1958 and the emissions have gone up every year except for 2020[ more on that in a future column]. This is the truth. These are the facts.
I cannot remember a time in my life when the respect for science was this low. The ostrich position can work for someone who wants to avoid the real world, but it does not work for a nation or a planet. And hopefully the electorate will punish those who want to dumb down the world.
There is another problem with this horrific act and that is geopolitical. As I have written often, it is the largest GDPs, the biggest nation-state polluters, who need to lead humanity out of this civilization ending dynamic. The vast amount of CO2 in the atmosphere – some 1400 gigatons – has been emitted from the EU, the U.S., and China, with India coming up fast. It is these top polluting countries that both need to change as they are disproportionately responsible for GHG emissions and need to show that actions speak louder than words. The fact that the U.S. is doing these massive budget cuts to NOAA absolutely shows the world that the country is not interested in facing the biggest threat to our species existence. This means that China and the EU by default must now lead. And lead they will.