Widespread information On Wednesday, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, recommended the inversion of the longtime federal position that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger the public. This recommendation is, on the one hand, fully predictable. President Donald Trump, who asked the EPA for an opinion on the subject on the day of the inauguration, said that climate change is a “hoax” and a “scam”. Thus, Zeldin could probably have been on what he was supposed to do. He is not a physicist: his few previous incursions in environmental policy include, during his mandate as a member of the Long Island Congress, presenting the Fluke Fairness Act, to change the management of dynamism fishing and, while operating without success for the Governor of New York, committing to smash the Empire State. But the proposed reversal would be really and deeply shameful – not only the climate denial but the basic denial. In the current debate on the question of whether our current dystopia is Orwellian or Huxleyan, this is true “1984“Tips, the equivalent of a periodic table of” war is peace “and” freedom is slavery “.
It would also be an explicit repudiation of American scientific leadership, because it is in this country that scientists, funded by or working for the government, understood the role of carbon in our atmosphere. It is a story that deserves to be told, if only to launch this potential withdrawal in clearer relief.
The period from July 1957 to December 1958 was appointed the international geophysical year, a global scientific effort to understand the earth and its environment. The researchers discovered everything Van Allen belts (two radiation belts that surround and protect the earth) to the underwater ridges that helped us understand the tectonics of the plates. The launch of Spoutnik (and the catch -up of Vanguard of America) was also part of the Igy. But, in the long term, nothing counted as much as the deployment of an instrument installed by a young American postdoc named Charles David Keeling, which was used to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Keeling, who worked with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, installed his instrument in the newly built observatory of the US Weather Bureau, on the northern flank of the Mauna Loa volcano, on the island of Hawaii. With funding from the National Science Foundation, he sample2 produced by the combustion of humanity of coal and gas and oil; Instead, carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere. In 1960, he had the beginnings of what we now call the Keel curvewhich shows the relentless (and accelerating) rhythm of this accumulation, the graphic representation of our fate. This surveillance station is, for the moment, still active under the auspices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
What these data could not show was precisely when the accumulation of carbon dioxide would become a crisis. Understand who took the hard work of another team of American scientists, led by James Hansen. A graduate of the Iowa University, with three science diplomas, he went to work at Nasa At his peak in the early 1970s. While most of the agency focused on space programs, he studied the atmosphere of Venus, which gave him a good point of view to try to understand how the earth would heat up. By using central computers banks from a Nasa The outpost of the Upper West Side in Manhattan, he spent the late 1970s and the 1980s building one of the first climate models in the world and compiling the most complete global temperature data set. This work allowed him to go before the congress in early summer 1988 and explain that the planet was now heating up following all this CO2And that it was going to become good, much worse.
American science, in other words, had carried out a remarkable feat: it had given us an early warning in a timely time of the greatest danger that our species has ever been confronted. I have listed all the players involved because of these agencies – the NSF, Noaa,, Nasa– are precisely the institutions which are now informed to rub their websites and reintegrate their subsidies for projects that go against the Diktat of the Administration on the Climate and “Diversity”. (Thursday, the government began to fire hundreds of workers to Noaa.) Alma Mater de Hansen, the University of Iowa, reports that it could undergo a loss of more than thirty-three million dollars of research research reductions. Zeldin’s EPA, Trump said on Wednesday aims to reduce its sixty-five percent staff. The Trump administration is resistant to science in general – an unaccompanied school child died on Wednesday with the measleseven if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.the Ministry of Health and Social Services announced that it was paused Covid-Vacine Project. But it is particularly resistant to climate science, because taking the subject seriously would mean reducing the use of fossil fuels. And fossil fuel helped pay Trump’s elections; This is the key to his plan of “energy domination”.
Again, no one should be surprised by Wednesday’s announcement. But, against the historical context, it is the clearest potential sign that I know about the decline of America. We have learned the truth once, and now we were actively giving up this truth. The word has come down from the mountain – in this case, Mauna Loa – and now we can break the tablets because their message asks us too much. Keeling’s curve is increasingly increasing; The curve of basic national responsibility is strongly lowered now. It is difficult to imagine a deep background than that, but, if there is one, then men like Lee Zeldin will surely work hard to find it. It may be the last remaining research project. ♦