The truth shall set you free

Prior to that, the record-setting year was 2014. These records have occurred despite conservative insistence a few years back that global warming had ceased and perhaps even begun to reverse itself.

We don’t yet know what the climate will do in 2017. Under our new president, we also don’t know whether federal scientists who specialize in that field will still be able to collect, analyze and disseminate that data. We don’t even know whether those scientists will still have jobs.

Here’s what we do know:

We know that such a sustained global phenomenon cannot be explained away as “the climate is always changing,” nor dismissed as a hoax led by China to destroy American capitalism, as our president has publicly alleged. The planetary heating that we are now witnessing within the tiny span of a human lifetime is occurring at a far more rapid pace than anything ever recorded in temperature data or data drawn from tree rings, ice cores and other scientific means that reach back hundreds of thousands of years.

As a matter of basic physics, we also know that such rapid disruption of an otherwise stable system cannot occur without a cause. We know that nothing occurring in the natural world — not sunspots or other solar activity, for example — could be that cause. We have one, and only one, plausible explanation for what is happening, and that is us.

Rather than confront that fact and deal with it rationally, the Trump administration has begun a concerted effort to hide the evidence. All mention of climate change has already been removed from the White House website. The Centers for Disease Control here in Atlanta suddenly canceled a long-scheduled conference on the health challenges created by climate change, such as extended heat waves and the spread of tropical disease.

According to Reuters, the Environmental Protection Agency has also been ordered to shut down its main climate-change webpage, and all EPA studies will now undergo political review before being released. EPA employees are already under a gag rule forbidding them to communicate with the press or the taxpayers who pay their salaries. Bob Walker, a senior science advisor to Trump, has said that NASA will be stripped of its earth-science budget and forced to cease “politically correct environmental monitoring.” And back in December, the Trump transition team demanded the names of all Department of Energy employees and contractors who had attended United Nations climate meetings or who had worked on climate-change data.

The demand was rejected by the Obama administration and then withdrawn, but the message had been sent.

Meanwhile, the temperature reached a balmy 71 degrees here in Atlanta on Wednesday. That’s the 10th day this January with temperatures of 70 or above. So far this year, we have set or tied four all-time records for high temperatures. By themselves, such localized data mean nothing. But they are being repeated month after month, year after year, in sites all across the globe.

The scary part is that these are just the early signs of what threatens to be a truly profound climate shift. We can retreat into alternative facts that may allow us to ignore that reality, for a time. But alternative facts cannot give us an alternative Earth.