The climate report scientists are afraid Trump will censor, explained

Wait until these guys find out what the new scientific report says!
Ron Sach-Pool/Getty Images

The report is a reminder US climate politics are still insane

There’s been some buzz about a story in the New York Times on a climate report — a draft assessment of climate science, scheduled to be released by the US government this fall, that scientists shared with the newspaper Monday out of fears that Donald Trump’s administration would change or suppress it.

A few things to clarify: First, the report was actually first posted to the Internet Archive in January (though, as the Times says, it wasn’t “widely publicized”). So this wasn’t technically a leak. And so far, no Trump administration official has attempted to censor it.

The Times received the report from unnamed scientists “concerned that it would be suppressed.” But several other people involved in the process, contacted by Emily Holden of Politico, “have seen no indication” that Trump intends to do so. The report is currently waiting on a review from the heads of 13 federal agencies, who will have to sign off on it by August 18. And as of now, it’s still expected to be released this fall.

It’s certainly possible that Trump will mess with this report! He and several of his top environmental officials doubt its central conclusion: that human influence is driving recent warming and will drive much more by the end of the century, with extremely harmful effects. And it wouldn’t be a first time a Republican president manipulated and suppressed climate reports from government scientists.

When or if he does, that will be a story.

In the meantime, the report offers a good opportunity to discuss just how surreal -- and deeply dysfunctional — climate politics are right now, as the science of climate change grows stronger and stronger.

Would this guy censor a climate science report?
NurPhoto / Cheriss May via Getty Images

The report’s conclusion is about as certain as anything gets in the physical sciences

The report, written by scientists inside and outside government, is an authoritative assessment of the latest physical science on climate change and its impacts. It is ultimately meant to be included in a much broader National Climate Assessment, which will also grapple with economic and political questions. Presidents are required to issue an NCA every four years. The next one (the fourth) is due in 2018.

The report’s conclusions should be no surprise to anyone who’s followed climate science in recent years: outside the Southwest, more rain; inside the Southwest, more heat and droughts; and along the West Coast, lots more big storms.

The top-line conclusion is that “it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.” There is, the report says, “no convincing alternative explanation” for that warming.

NCA4, via NYT

In the parlance of science, “extremely likely” means 95 to 100 percent probable. That is an extraordinary degree of confidence in science, especially about a complex phenomenon.

Let’s pause here. The report contains much else of interest, including new science more confidently attributing individual weather events to climate change, but it is this central conclusion we should dwell on for a moment.

There are many uncertainties in climate science, as such scholars as New York Times columnist Bret Stephens are eager to remind us. In particular, it is difficult to predict geographically and temporally local effects with much precision — frustrating, since it is the local effects we are most eager to understand.

But the central conclusion — that human influence is driving recent warming and will drive much more by the end of the century, with extremely deleterious effects — is not uncertain. It is about as certain as anything gets in the physical sciences.

And it is precisely this conclusion that the Republican Party — not just the president, not just the heads of EPA and the Department of Energy, but the majority of the party’s national elected officials — denies, or at least claims to doubt.

The far right, including Trump, thinks it’s all a hoax. More “moderate” Republicans take a fuzzier position, saying that the atmosphere may be warming, but we’re not sure how much humans contribute.

But we are sure, 95 to 100 percent sure. That is why it’s fair to call the GOP a denialist party. Unlike any other major political party in any other developed democracy, it denies (or “doubts”) the central conclusion of climate science.

But this scientific report won’t make Trump, or the GOP, do anything

It’s impossible to predict what Trump, or his Environmental Protection Agency, will do about (or to) the report, especially now that the Times has drawn attention to it.

I hesitate to predict whether he will do damage to the report. What I will predict is that the report won’t do damage to him. It will not, as the Times argued in a follow-up piece, “force President Trump to choose between accepting the conclusions of his administration’s scientists and the demands of his conservative supporters.” It won’t force him to do anything.

Government scientists have been saying anthropocentric climate change is real for decades now. So have non-government scientists. So have scientific journals and research institutions. So have the vast majority of the world’s governments.

Seems like a trend.
NCA4, via NYT

None of that has forced the GOP to choose or to move beyond double-talk. Making the evidence even clearer — like the reports before, oh, the reports — will not force a choice either.

There are two reasons for this, one shallow, one deep. The shallow one is simply that government reports do not shape politics, politics shapes government reports. The Times’s Michael Shear and Brad Plumer lay the history out well:

President Bill Clinton’s administration released the first National Climate Assessment in 2000 to little fanfare, wary of injecting the scientific report into a presidential campaign in progress. Mr. Bush’s administration delayed for years on releasing an updated version until the environmental groups successfully sued it. A final version was quietly released beginning in May 2008.

The Obama administration, by contrast, trumpeted the third version of the assessment in 2014, with the government building a graphics-heavy website to tout the findings and Mr. Obama conducting TV interviews on weather networks about the effects of global warming.

Presidential reports only make the impact that presidents want them to. Trump can bury the report. He can quickly overwhelm it with new craziness. He can amend it to say that fighting climate change will destroy the economy, or that coal is vital to our precious bodily fluids. He can rattle off some nonsense and move on. He can do whatever he wants.

The deeper reason the report won’t force a choice on Trump or the GOP is simply that the US conservative movement has cleaved itself from any of the mechanisms that might do the forcing. It does not care what scientists say. It does not care what non-conservative media says. It does not care what liberal politicians, foreign leaders, or fancy academics say.

The conservative base does not feel obliged to accept anything that any of those people say, about climate change or anything else. And it is immune to any disapprobation they might express or shame they might try to induce.

There is no mechanism by which Trump supporters could be reached or made to care about this report. And so Trump has no reason to care about it. The institutions that might once have forced him to care all used soft power, social pressure, and that simply doesn’t work on conservatives any more. There’s no legal way to make him care, so he will have no trouble bullshitting right past it.

Only social and political pressure inside the GOP will uproot its climate denialism

Conservative climate denialism has become so familiar that we forget how surreal it is: The country’s own scientists cranking out report after report while one of two major political parties blithely ignores and contradicts them. That it is so surreal is an indication of how deeply dysfunctional our current political situation is.

The US conservative movement has rejected the institutions that society has charged with producing knowledge. It exists within its own bubble of counter-institutions, in a factless fantasia, increasingly cut off from outside reach. And the conservative movement runs the GOP.

Rush Limbaugh: Don’t believe government, academia, science, or media. All lies!
RushLimbaugh.com

That is the core of the problem, as I argued at length in my post on tribal epistemology . 

Against the prevalence and persistence of partisan division, a new scientific report on climate change will simply bounce off. Scientists and advocates and politicians will shout about it, mainstreams news publications will cover it, cable news will host talking-heads debates about it ... and then the 24 hours will pass and something else will dominate public attention.

More evidence, we must conclude after decades of experience, will not force any choices on the GOP. Only social and political pressure from inside the party will do that. The party’s elites (especially in media) must lead the party base away from denialism, rather than stoking it for political purposes.

Until that happens, there’s not much everyone else can do but gape in horror — and work around them.

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Original article https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/8/9/16117406/leaked-climate-report-scandal

by David Roberts https://www.vox.com/authors/david-roberts

Vox https://www.vox.com/

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