Widespread news reports on Wednesday said that the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, has recommended the reversal of the long-standing federal position that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger the public. That recommendation is, on the one hand, entirely predictable. President Donald Trump, who asked the E.P.A. for an opinion on the subject on Inauguration Day, has said that climate change is a “hoax” and a “scam.” So Zeldin could have been in little doubt about what he was supposed to do. He’s no physicist: his few previous forays into environmental policy include, during his tenure as a congressman from Long Island, introducing the Fluke Fairness Act, to change the management of fluke fishing, and, while running unsuccessfully for governor of New York, pledging to frack the Empire State. But the proposed reversal would be truly and deeply disgraceful—not just climate denial but basic-science denial. In the ongoing debate about whether our current dystopia is Orwellian or Huxleyan, this is true “1984” stuff, the periodic table equivalent of “War is peace” and “Freedom is slavery.”
It would also be an explicit repudiation of American scientific leadership, because it’s in this country that scientists, funded by or working for the government, came to understand the role of carbon in our atmosphere. That’s a story worth retelling, if only to throw this potential recantation into sharper relief.
The period from July, 1957, to December, 1958, was designated the International Geophysical Year, a global scientific effort to understand the Earth and its environment. Researchers discovered everything from the Van Allen belts (two belts of radiation that surround and shield the Earth) to the undersea mountain ridges that helped us understand plate tectonics. The launch of Sputnik (and America’s Vanguard catch-up) was part of the I.G.Y., too. But, in the long run, nothing mattered as much as the deployment of an instrument installed by a young American postdoc named Charles David Keeling, which was used to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Keeling, who worked with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, set up his instrument in the U.S. Weather Bureau’s newly built observatory, on the north flank of the Mauna Loa volcano, on the island of Hawaii. With funding from the National Science Foundation, he sampled the air, and what he found was that the oceans were not, as long-standing scientific wisdom had held, soaking up all the excess CO2 produced by humankind’s combustion of coal and gas and oil; instead, carbon dioxide was accumulating in the atmosphere. By 1960, he had the beginnings of what we now call the Keeling Curve, which shows the relentless (and accelerating) pace of that accumulation, the graphic depiction of our fate. That monitoring station is, for the moment, still operating, under the auspices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
What that data couldn’t show was precisely when the accumulation of carbon dioxide would become a crisis. Understanding that took the hard work of another crew of American scientists, led by James Hansen. A graduate of the University of Iowa, with three degrees in the sciences, he went to work at NASA in its heyday in the early nineteen-seventies. While most of the agency was focussed on space programs, he was studying the atmosphere of Venus, which gave him a good vantage point for trying to understand how the Earth would heat. Using banks of mainframe computers from a NASA outpost on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he spent the late nineteen-seventies and eighties building one of the world’s early climate models and compiling the most comprehensive data set of global temperatures. This work allowed him to go before Congress in the early summer of 1988 and explain that the planet was now heating up as a result of all that CO2, and that it was going to get much, much worse.
American science, in other words, had performed a remarkable feat: it had given us a timely early warning of the single greatest danger our species has ever faced. I listed all the players involved because those agencies—the N.S.F., NOAA, NASA—are precisely the institutions now being told to scrub their Web sites and reëxamine their grants for projects that run counter to the Administration’s diktat on climate—and “diversity.” (On Thursday, the government began laying off hundreds of workers at NOAA.) Hansen’s alma mater, the University of Iowa, reports that it could face a loss of more than thirty-three million dollars from the federal-funding cuts on research. Zeldin’s E.P.A., Trump said on Wednesday, will aim to reduce its staff by some sixty-five per cent. The Trump Administration is resistant to science in general—an unvaccinated school-aged child died in Texas on Wednesday from the measles, even as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was pausing a new COVID-vaccine project. But it’s particularly resistant to climate science, because taking the subject seriously would mean reducing the use of fossil fuels. And fossil fuel helped pay for Trump’s election; it’s the key to his plan for “energy dominance.”
Again, no one should be surprised by Wednesday’s announcement. But, set against the historical context, it’s the clearest potential sign I know of America’s decline. We learned the truth once, and now we are actively renouncing that truth. The word came down from the mountain—in this case, Mauna Loa—and now we may smash the tablets because their message asks too much of us. The Keeling Curve goes precipitously up; the curve of basic national responsibility is curving sharply down now. It’s hard to imagine a bottom deeper than this, but, if there is one, then men like Lee Zeldin will surely work hard to find it. It may be the last remaining research project. ♦
