I’m a climate scientist. Trump’s U.N. address is a fire hose of misinformation

While many of my scientific colleagues and I anticipated things would get bad for science once Donald Trump was reelected president last year, the pace at which he and his congressional enablers have implemented their anti-science agenda nonetheless remains shocking and disturbing.

That was especially true this week.

On Monday, Trump held a press conference with his secretary of health and human services, anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and they insisted — despite any scientific evidence — that autism is caused by Tylenol and vaccines. The medical science community reacted in what can only be described as horror. Then on Tuesday, Trump dismissed the climate crisis — for the second time now — as a hoax in a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. 

The press conference and the U.N. address would be perfect additions to “Science Under Siege,” the new book I co-authored with vaccine scientist Peter Hotez. As we point out in its early pages, the U.S. has a long history of celebrating the contributions of science and scientists. From Eli Whitney and the cotton gin in 1793 to Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone in 1883 to the Wright Brothers and powered flight in 1903, to physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley and the transistor in 1947, and so on. We are a country that was built on an embrace of scientific research and development.

Watching Trump this week, that all feels like a distant memory. Rather than championing science and supporting the work of scientists, the Trump administration has done just the opposite. 

Hotez has already spoken out about the anti-vax press conference. So let me speak to Trump’s anti-climate U.N. speech, which is a continuation of his efforts to promote climate denial and clean energy myths in service of the fossil fuel plutocrats, polluters and petro states to which he is beholden.

Trump’s U.N. speech was a textbook example of what’s come to be known in science communication circles as the “gish gallop,” wherein anti-science promoters attempt to overwhelm you with a fire hose of plausible-sounding but fundamentally false claims and talking points.

Let me address the falsehoods in Trump’s speech from the standpoint of a down-in-the-trenches climate scientist who has litigated the dishonest claims of climate deniers for more than two decades. This is truly a challenge because nearly every single word drips with mendacity. So we’ll stick to the main howlers.

Let’s start with Trump’s claim that the scientists “said global warming will kill the world. But then it started getting cooler. So now they could just call it climate change.” Every word is false.

Climate scientists haven’t said global warming will kill the world, but rather that, unchecked, it will constitute a fundamental threat to human civilization. That’s no longer a theoretical prediction. Climate change — as Bay Area residents are well aware — is generating devastating extreme weather events, including heat waves, wildfires, droughts, floods and super storms that play out in our daily headlines.

The terms “global warming” and “climate change” are used by climate scientists because they are complementary terms (the first describes the warming of the Earth’s surface, while the latter describes the larger consequences of that warming: shifting ocean and air currents, drought, ice loss, sea level rise, etc.). And while some scientists speculated about the possibility of cooling in the 1970s due to the rapid increase in sunlight-reflecting sulphur pollution from dirty coal burning, which partially offset the warming from carbon pollution, the claim that the scientific community was predicting cooling is an enduring myth promoted by climate deniers. The students in my introductory climate course know these things. Shouldn’t the president of the United States?

Trump insists that “all of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong.” For good measure, Trump dismisses the scientists as “stupid people” (a case of “projection” perhaps). But what about the claims? Fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil’s own scientists, back in the early 1980s, secretly predicted the precise planetary warming that has occurred. They even anticipated the potential for “catastrophic” consequences.

Thanks to the efforts by ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies to hide such research, launch attacks on climate scientists coming to the same conclusions and lobby against efforts to reduce carbon emissions, we are now witnessing those catastrophic consequences. In many respects — particularly concerning extreme weather events — the impacts are actually exceeding the scientific predictions.

It is easy to ascribe Trump’s anti-climate rants to his contrarian personality and whimsical nature. But in so doing, we do ourselves a disservice. What Trump is really doing is advancing a plan laid down years ago by plutocrats and polluters. And making a mockery of our country as he does so.

Michael E. Mann is the Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-author with Peter Hotez of the new book, “Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces that Threaten our World.”