American Nero: Why Trump is trying to burn down the National Academy of Sciences

In a post on Truth Social earlier this month, Trump claimed that the National Academy of Sciences published “fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on climate change.” He has now ordered “Federal Suspension and Debarment Officials” to review the organization’s conduct.

Although he referred to multiple “Manuals,” the president’s Truth Social screed is really about a single manual: the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. The Reference Manual serves “as a go-to document judges can use when they deal with issues involving scientific testimony.” For the first time, the most recent version of the manual  contains a climate science chapter. It describes the hard scientific evidence that fossil fuel burning is influencing extreme weather events. This science is anathema to the oil industry and to its conservative supporters, including the president, and they have responded by attacking the manual and its authors.

The Federal Judicial Center caved to a request by 27 Republican state attorneys general to remove the climate chapter from the Reference Manual, but it is still publicly available on the website of the National Academy of Sciences. This open defiance of overt political pressure is causing problems for the National Academies.

Established by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the National Academy of Sciences is the premier scientific organization in the United States. One part of its mission is to produce and promote “the adoption of independent, authoritative, trusted scientific advice to the government for the benefit of society.”

I’m a member of the National Academy of Sciences. I’m also a climate scientist. I’m writing this essay as a private citizen, not as a representative of the official or unofficial views of the academy. I simply care about its survival.

I’ve written and spoken about Trump’s views on climate science since 2014. In essays, op-eds, podcasts, and open letters—including an open letter to Trump himself. It’s painful and disheartening to recognize that nothing I’ve written has made one iota of difference. Trump continues to incorrectly dismiss climate science as a fraud. As a con job. As a hoax.

The real fraud is Donald J. Trump. The real hoax is in Trump’s efforts to persuade Americans that human-caused climate change is not happening. That wildfires are solely due to bad forest management. Or to Canadians. The real con job is in Trump’s repeated lies about global warming. That it isn’t happening. That all changes in climate are purely natural.

Trump is destroying so much that is good and valuable in America. He’s generating the very “American carnage” he described in his first inauguration speech. Carnage in pursuit of power, revenge, personal financial gain, and ego. He is remaking the country in his own image.

Now the National Academy of Sciences is firmly in his sights.

Why? Why does he care about an organization of scientists? A confederacy of nerds? Why does he care about climate science? Why does he believe, falsely, that climate science is fraudulent?

The National Academy of Sciences is on Trump’s radar because they are in his way. The climate science the National Academy of Sciences has assessed, for over four decades, is in fundamental conflict with Trump’s political agenda: the promotion of fossil fuels and the promotion of the powerful fossil fuel interests that have supported Trump’s rise. Science shows that fossil fuel burning is affecting Earth’s climate in harmful ways. So in Trump world, science is the enemy.

The cause of President Trump’s attack on the National Academy of Sciences is simple. The National Academy of Sciences is good at what it does. It has published reports on pretty much every aspect of climate science, most recently on what’s called “event attribution,” or the influence of human-caused climate change on extreme events.

Event attribution research provides hard evidence that fossil-fueled warming is ratcheting up the intensity and frequency of heat waves, and of extreme rainfall. This is the kind of evidence that may put fossil fuel companies on the hook for damages in lawsuits. As the tobacco industry learned decades ago, knowingly causing harm to human health can affect your corporate bottom line. The fossil fuel companies will eventually learn the same lesson.

But not under Donald Trump’s watch. He will do all he can to shield the Exxons and Chevrons of the world from accountability. If shielding means destroying the National Academy of Sciences, then so be it. If shielding means crippling the ability of this country’s leading institutions to monitor global warming, to study it with sophisticated computer models, and to understand the causes of warming, then so be it. If shielding means actively discouraging the use of cheap, efficient sources of low carbon energy, then so be it. If shielding means coming up with deeply flawed government reports that portray climate science as unsettled, then so be it.

President Trump doesn’t like bad news. Human-caused global warming is bad news. It’s bad news for his deep-pocketed supporters in the fossil fuel industry. It’s bad news for the narrative that under Trump’s tenure, everything is wonderful in America. It’s bad news for the fiction that the country’s future is bright.

But our future is not bright. It’s hot. It’s a future with lots of bad news and “downers.” Excess mortality from increasingly more intense heat waves is a downer. Larger, more intense wildfires are a downer, burning not only our forests, but also our cities, and leaving us choking in acrid smoke. Sea-level rise is a downer, taking billions of dollars off the value of coastal real estate.

This is why Trump is so exercised about the National Academy of Sciences. He doesn’t want event attribution reports. He doesn’t want fast-track reports assessing the evidence for human effects on global climate. He doesn’t want US courts to have a climate science chapter in the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, which provides judges with credible, vetted information about the reality, seriousness, costs, and causes of climate change.

It’s said that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Others have argued he actually started the fire, so that he could rebuild the city to his liking. We cannot allow our American Nero to fuel the flames while the planet burns with his reckless pro-fossil fuel policies. And we cannot allow him to destroy institutions—like the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine—that provide a candle in the growing darkness of ignorance.