Donald Trump and his cabal of climate change deniers, and enablers, will unleash an assault on everything this country holds dear in less than a month. This spectacle will not be easy to endure. Vladimir Putin’s illegitimate poodle has announced the nominations of Rex Tillerson, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, and Rick Perry to his Cabinet, sending a strong signal to the science world that his top priority is to destroy the environment in order to enrich the billionaires of the fossil fuel industry who funded his campaign.
Donald Trump is violent and out of control, his frenzied supporters are violent and out of control. He will harass scientists at NASA, NOAA and other government facilities. He will encourage his white nationalist supporters to threaten them. This isn’t anything new, the president-elect has no qualms about hating on people unlike him and ruining their lives. We have seen this movie multiple times since he announced his run for the presidency in January of 2015. It is his MO, his Modus Operandi, and it has worked for him quite well. He has no intention of ever stopping these tactics in order get what he wants. He is proud of himself, his power as president will corrupt him ever more than he is now.
Salon Magazine has a post regarding a Politico piece that reports on the unprecedented move of Trump relying not only on government Secret Service protection, but also on his own private security and intelligence sources. He will continue to use them after the inauguration. WTF, you may ask? Salon explains:
If the Politico article is correct, Trump’s private security staffers have not been trained for this kind of work and may actually make Trump less safe than if they were not there at all. All this raises the question of why he insists on having them around.
It turns out that the main function of Trump’s private security forces has been to deal with protesters at his rallies, which he has bizarrely continued to hold since the election and promises to continue to do so. This past weekend in Mobile, Alabama, he explained why:
They’re saying, “As president, he shouldn’t be doing rallies.” But I think we should, right? We’ve done everything else the opposite. This is the way you get an honest word out.
As Robert Reich observed in Newsweek, this is one of the ways Trump disseminates propaganda (such as insisting that he won in a landslide). One can easily imagine him telling his crowds that the CIA is plotting against him or that authoritarian policies are necessary to fight whatever enemies he decides are keeping America from being great again.
QZ has some fascinating reporting on how climate scientists are adjusting to the oncoming assault on fact and reason. It is a must-read, bursting with tales of courage, passion and the necessity of scientists to protect their work from Trump’s charlatans.
The Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has established a hotline for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employees to report political meddling. There’s currently concern among NOAA scientists about who Trump’s pick to head the agency will be. “I am hearing a lot of worry,” union director Andrew Rosenberg told Bloomberg. “The worry is that they will be putting another ideologue in place.”
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Other ominous signs for scientists include the Trump transition team request to the DOE for the names of all employees and contractors who attended annual global climate talks hosted by the United Nations within the last five years, scientists who have worked on climate change, and the professional memberships of lab workers. On Dec. 13, DOE spokesman Eben Burnham-Snyder said the agency would not honor the request—after which the Trump team denied the questionnaire was authorized and withdrew the demand.
Fearful that a Trump administration might destroy or bury climate-science findings, scientists are also collaborating on ways to preserve existing government data on independent servers. At a “guerrilla archiving” event in Toronto on Dec. 17, volunteers copied irreplaceable public data in case of emergency deletion. Scientists and database experts at the University of Pennsylvania are collaborating on mass downloads of federal data, compiling them online to harbor scientific information. “Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a sudden seems potentially realistic, or at least something you’d want to hedge against,” said Nick Santos, an environmental researcher at the University of California at Davis, told the Washington Post.
The current head of the EPA, Gina McCarthy, states that it will not be as easy for Trump as he would like to think because his anti-science cabinet members “will be required by the Clean Air Act to establish a scientific foundation for any new law or action that undoes regulations in existence that curb carbon dioxide emissions.” She explains:
If they choose [to] develop a different record then they have a right to do that, but it’s going to be a very high burden of proof for them, because I have no question that what we have done will be solid from a science perspective. They have to figure out why the climate science isn’t overwhelming and go back all the way to the Supreme Court to explain why decisions we’ve already made are no longer correct, and I wouldn’t want to have that burden myself.
Stay diligent, stay strong. For now, you can help climate scientists fight back by making a donation to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Donate.
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