Climate scientists are hosting a 100-hour YouTube livestream in response to Trump's research funding cuts

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Climate scientists are gathering on YouTube for 100 hours to talk about the importance of weather research amid White House funding cuts.

Climate scientists are hosting a 100-hour YouTube livestream in response to Trump's research funding cuts : Read more

 

[Ken Fabian]

I can only applaud the scientists involved and note that they should not be having to promote scientific understanding of what is happening to the climate; it is a very bad sign that they feel they must engage in this way. The real responsibility to be informed in order to make informed decisions lies with those holding the highest Offices - governments called on their science agencies to provide the expert assessments.

It is alarming and dismaying to see the depths of current US Administration and Congress majority commitment to suppressing the kinds of science that provide invaluable windows of opportunity to avoid the worst effects of climate change and the extreme weather events that are expected to get worse the more that GHG levels grow.

People in the highest offices of responsibility and trust, who should know better (and probably do) appear to be setting aside governmental duties of care for all their citizens in their defending of fossil fuel interests against accountability - saving fossil fuels from global warming.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Ken, I think you are somewhat misunderstanding the political dynamics of "the climate debate".

I don't think that protection of fossil fuel companies' profits is the controlling political issue.

I think that it is mainly the unwillingness of the public at large to accept the proclamations of the government that their lifestyles must change as directed by the government.

It is unwelcome, even scary news, and can be conflated with other unwelcome news from the same government about other things that do not seem to be well founded scientifically, but are being pushed politically. So, the environmental degradation debates get dealt with in the public mind as just something else that must be resisted from a source that is not trusted - for all sorts of reasons.

There are politicians who intentionally use that resentment, and even try to fan it into outrage, for the purpose of gaining political power. And, that seems to be a very effective strategy at this point in time, and not just here in the U.S.

To get over that, we are going to need to show the public solutions to the problems that are acceptable to (most of) them. We can't expect to succeed by simply outlawing what the public has been doing and expect them to "find a way" to deal with it somehow. And, by "show", I don't mean simply writing a technical paper that is claiming something is possible or even profitable. We will need to have "first adopters" actually demonstrate that something works acceptably well and is affordable for nearly everybody.

Governments try to do that sometimes with subsidies for new things. Solar is a good example. But, too often, the manipulated economics of the subsidies are used to incorrectly claim affordability for all, even though it is well known that the subsidies can only be affordable at small fractions of market penetration. Again, solar has been a good example of misleading statistics on affordability at both the residential and grid levels. There is sort of a race between getting the savings from mass production to offset the losses of subsidies as market penetration increases. Sometimes that can work. But, it is not a foregone conclusion that it always works. And people have a right to fear that assurances that it is working may not be true from governments and activists. But, seeing their neighbors happy with it is a huge selling tactic.