Scientific institutions are facing unprecedented challenges under the Trump administration, placing the future of climate monitoring and environmental policy in jeopardy. The writer says shutting down scientific inquiry because it discovers things you don’t like may satisfy your urge to live in denial, but will soon turn deadly.
Mark Gongloff
The Trump administration’s crusade to dismantle a scientific establishment long a national treasure and the envy of the world is a blueprint for deliberate ignorance. But that’s a feature, not a bug. As Adam Serwer wrote about the first Trump administration’s cruelty, the ignorance is the point. If objective reality as measured by science is no longer available, then it’s easier for President Donald Trump to conjure up a new reality in a way that thrills and rewards supporters, including the fossil-fuel companies that helped get him elected a second time.
The latest example is a plan by Trump’s National Science Foundation to dismantle a vast monitoring system called the Ocean Observatories Initiative, which compiles mountains of publicly available data about every aspect of the northern Atlantic and Pacific oceans. One of its jobs is to track the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the network of currents that helps keep Europe from freezing over, among other desirable effects. Scientists have become increasingly anxious about the health of AMOC as the planet has warmed, melting Greenland’s ice and disrupting the system that keeps AMOC moving.
