No one mistakes the current United States president for a scientist, but this country has not been by led by someone so completely illiterate in the scientific method since…uh, about a decade ago. But even President George W. Bush rarely demonstrated such open disdain for science in public. He merely allowed his political aides to doctor reports, including climate change findings, behind closed doors. No, Donald Trump has set a new standard for brazen disregard for science, as exemplified by an intergalactic interview with the Associated Press Tuesday:
AP to Trump on climate: Scientists say we’re getting to a point where it’s irreversible
Trump: My uncle was a scientist…and “I didn’t talk to him about this particular subject, but I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides” pic.twitter.com/pMbjlodi0D
– Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 17, 2018
He really went there. There Are Very Fine Scientists on Both Sides. This is a kaleidoscopic remake of the national disgrace that was his response to Nazis marching through an American city chanting his name. It is also the latest in a line of braindead responses to last week’s report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which found civilization as we know it will be in severe peril by 2040, and that we have 12 years to dramatically change course to avoid that scenario.
On Monday, the president suggested the pattern of hurricanes increasing in intensity is temporary because the “1890s were brutal.” Last week, he said he’d been given the U.N. report but hadn’t read it. (Shocker. They should ask him now, a week later.) Yet he still felt comfortable questioning “who drew it” and said he could produce “fabulous reports” of his own about the future of our planet.
REPORTER: Have you read the alarming UN report about imminent, drastic climate change?
TRUMP: “It was given to me, & I want to look at who drew it. You know, which group drew it, because I can give you reports that are fabulous & reports that aren’t so good.” #DrewIt pic.twitter.com/qADyFlmI8i
– Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 9, 2018
Trump has a predator’s instinct for how people work and for identifying their weaknesses. He knows what motivates them and what plays on TV and how the media ecosystem functions. He especially knows how to keep the spotlight where it ought to be: on Donald Trump.
But in terms of intellectual capacity-the ability to reason at a high level, the volume of knowledge he’s accumulated about complex phenomena, his familiarity with how humanity gathers information about the world-he is a complete and utter moron. He’s a simpleton. He has absolutely no concept of how science works, which is why he feels comfortable telling the AP that he has “a natural instinct for science.” Even if he did, which he doesn’t, that would have exactly zero bearing on whether climate change is real. To the scientific community, the President of the United States just saying things has the same value as any other 72-year-old man yelling at them on a street corner: none.
The president seems to approach these issues as if he’s mired in the proceedings of one of the many lawsuits he’s filed or been the subject of. You’ve got a report from 91 leading scientists from 40 different countries based on more than 6,000 scientific studies conducted by still more scientists? This aggregate of knowledge is the result of many hundreds of scientists going out into the field, conducting research, compiling their findings into reports, and having other scientists ruthlessly tear at them in a process called “peer review”? The findings only begin to gain acceptance from the wider scientific community once they pass those tests and other scientists, working independently, can recreate the results?
Well, I’ve got another guy, and he says it’s all bunk.
Of course, this has been the standard Republican approach to scientific findings they don’t like for the last two or three decades. (“Don’t like” is a stand-in for “could, if acted upon, cut into the profits of the people and corporations who finance their campaigns.”) It’s the kind of phantasmagorical thinking that leads to supply-side economics, despite the wealth of evidence that tax cuts never actually trickle down. Just look at Kansas.
But Trump has ushered in a legitimate intellectual Dark Age in American politics, as if we’re in a Twilight Zone episode where the Enlightenment never happened and there’s no way for humanity to learn any verifiable truths about the world around us. Everything is opinion and hearsay. You’ve got the overwhelming majority of the scientific community? I’ve got a forensic expert that will take the stand because I’m paying his bills. Trump rejects the concept of objective reality across the board, because anything is true if enough people believe it. The only question is whether this is a feature of his psyche-see Tim O’Brien’s theory of his “radical solipsism”-or a result of his total ignorance about how science works. It’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg.
Meanwhile, our only planet careens towards a cataclysm. That’s the funny thing about real science: it simply tells you what’s happening. There’s no feelings involved. The seas don’t care that you don’t believe it-they’ll keep rising. The hurricanes will grow more ferocious, and dump more water when they make landfall, and tear the windows out of buildings in perhaps the world’s most advanced city. The wildfires will grow larger and burn longer. The droughts will desiccate farms and towns. The millions of future climate refugees will still have to leave their homelands, bound for who knows where.
Trump’s youngest son, Barron, will be in his mid-30s in 2040, when the U.N. report finds our civilization will be pushed to the brink. The rest of his life will be so much harder for it-even with all the money he’ll surely inherit through Totally Honest Accounting Practices. His father, who is in a position to do more about the problem than any other human being alive, is simply too dumb or too crooked to care.
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