Ben Santer To Joe Biden: Key 1st Step Is Rebuilding Capacity Of, Trust In Scientific Institutions
Dear Mr. Vice President:
In the last four years, federally funded science agencies were unmade and remade. They were given new marching orders. The mandate of providing the nation with unbiased scientific advice was replaced by a new mandate—that science is subordinate to the political goals and ego of President Trump.
The consequences of this new mandate are serious and far-reaching. The Environmental Protection Agency became the Environmental Pollution Agency, rolling back protections on clean air and clean water, and providing regulatory relief to President Trump’s campaign contributors from the fossil fuel industry. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were censured for challenging President Trump’s incorrect forecast of the path of a major hurricane. Their sin? Failing to adhere to the prime directive that the president is never wrong. At multiple federal agencies, climate science became “the subject that must not be named”—and the subject that should not be studied. And most recently, federally funded scientists unwilling to support the president’s incorrect narrative of a country “rounding the corner” on COVID-19 were publicly ridiculed and dismissed as “idiots.”
I was a federally funded climate scientist until September 2020, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research. I used pattern recognition methods to identify human “fingerprints” on climate.. I worked with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and at research institutes and universities around the world. Together, we found human fingerprints in the temperatures of the atmosphere, the land surface and the world’s oceans. We detected signs of human influence on ocean heat content and salinity, snowpack depth, the timing of streamflow from snow-fed river basins, atmospheric moisture, drought behavior and clouds. We learned that human fingerprints on climate are not an isolated phenomenon. They are ubiquitous, present in dozens of independently monitored climate records.
The Department of Energy supported climate fingerprint research for over 25 years. The research survived transitions between Democratic and Republican administrations. It withstood shifts in the composition of the Senate and Congress. But it did not survive a president who has falsely dismissed climate change as a hoax and a Chinese conspiracy. It did not survive a president who falsely asserts that science does not know the causes of climate change. It did not survive a very stable genius who considers his expertise superior to that of all scientific experts. Nor did climate fingerprinting survive the changing of the guard at a remade Department of Energy—new leadership that walked away from the same research the DOE had funded.
EDIT
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-open-letter-to-joe-biden/
