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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy Scientists Are Scared of Trump: A Pocket Guide
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-scientists-are-scared-of-trump-a-pocket-guide?intcid=mod-latestWhy Scientists Are Scared of Trump: A Pocket Guide
By Elizabeth Kolbert December 8, 2016
Next week, the American Geophysical Union will hold its annual conference in San Francisco. The A.G.U. meeting is one of the worlds première scientific gatheringslast fall, some twenty-four thousand experts in fields ranging from astronomy to volcanology attended. This year, in addition to the usual papers and journals, a new publication will be available to participants. Its called Handling Political Harassment and Legal Intimidation: A Pocket Guide for Scientists.
The guide is the creation of a group called the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. One of the groups founders, Joshua Wolfe, and its executive director, Lauren Kurtz, made the decision to write it on the day after the election. There is a lot of fear among scientists that they will become targets of people who are interested in science as politics, rather than progress, Wolfe told me in an e-mail.
With each passing day, that fear appears to be more well founded. The one quality that all of Trumps picks for his cabinet and his transition team seem to share is an expertise in the dark art of disinformation.
Consider, for example, Scott Pruitt, who is reportedly Trumps nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt, currently the attorney general of Oklahoma, is an outspoken critic of the agency that he would lead. This is not, in and of itself, disqualifying, but, as a 2014 investigative piece in the Times revealed, Pruitts criticisms have little basis in evidence. Instead, he has basically served as a mouthpiece for talking points dreamed up by the oil and gas industries. In one case, Pruitt signed a letter criticizing the E.P.A. for supposedly exaggerating the air pollution attributable to natural-gas drilling in Oklahoma. It turned out that the letter had been written for him by one of the states biggest drilling companies.
Outstanding! was the reaction that the companys director of government relations sent to Pruitts office.
Or consider Chris Shank, the first person Trump has named to whats being called the landing team for NASA. Shank has spent the last several years working for Representative Lamar Smith, of Texas, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Under Smith, the committee has held about a dozen hearings on climate change, all with the same objective: trying to prove that climate change isnt happening. This is impossible to do if you are relying on actual information, as opposed to the made-up sort. (In 2015, when government scientists published a study refuting one of Smiths favorite claimsthat there had been a pause in global warmingthe congressman responded by subpoenaing the scientists e-mails.) Shank has compared those who question the basics of climate science to Galileo, an analogy so absurd that Ted Cruz has also used it. To imagine that Ivanka Trump, who, according to Politico, wants to make climate change one of her signature issues, can counter the likes of Pruitt and Shank is to engage in the same sort of magical thinking that brought us Trump in the first place.
Much has been written lately about what Trumps victory reveals about the electorates relationship with the truth. (In short, nothing good.) But to say that we are living in a post-fact era is perhaps too benign. The problem is not just that too many people do not seem to care about the truth (though this is certainly a huge problem); its that a lot of peoplean increasing number of them in high government positionsinsist that their ravings are true, and try to act on them. This naturally brings them into conflict with those whose job it is to distinguish fact from fiction; hence the subpoenas and attempts to intimidate.
For climate scientists, the dangers of hewing to reality have been apparent for years. This is why the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund was founded in the first place, in 2011. As Marshall Shepherd, the director of the University of Georgias atmospheric-sciences program, tweeted recently, Lots of concern about Fake News. As a scientist that works in meteorology & climatology, welcome to our world, dealt with this for awhile. But this doesnt make the situation any easier to deal with. The pocket guides advice for scientists who think that they are being harassed? When in doubt, call a lawyer.
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Why Scientists Are Scared of Trump: A Pocket Guide (Original Post)
babylonsister
Dec 2016
OP
longship
(40,416 posts)1. We're really totally screwn on this.
Drumpf is already compiling a climate change enemies list. Those scientists who work in government who support climate change will be cast out of their jobs.
We are utterly screwn if that happens.