Nature: Scientists Speak On President Shitstain's Big, Bold Climate Bowel Movement
Jane Lubchenco, marine ecologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis and former administrator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:
Where to start? President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement shows a blatant disregard for the wishes of most Americans and business leaders, an irresponsible and callous dismissal of the health, safety and economic well-being of Americans, a moral emptiness in ignoring impacts to the poorest people in the US and around the world, and gross ignorance about overwhelming scientific evidence. Far from “protecting America” as the president stated, withdrawing from Paris will make America more vulnerable and diminish its world leadership. It is terrifying that the individual who should be leading the rest of the world is so arrogant and irresponsible.
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Thomas Stocker, former co-chair of climate science for the IPCC, and climate and environmental physicist at the University of Bern, Switzerland:
Trump’s decision to ignore scientific facts of climate disruption and the high risks of climate-change impacts is irresponsible not only towards his own people but to all people and life on this planet. The US administration prefers old technology over innovation and transformation. It is rejecting the enormous benefits and returns that leadership in the next industrial revolution — decarbonization — has to offer.
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Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Manchester, UK:
Beneath the veil of the low-carbon rhetoric of the Paris agreement, there is no evidence of a mitigation agenda even approaching the scale of our international obligations. Trump’s ostensibly reckless decision can be used either as a further excuse for continued apathy or as a catalyst for transforming our comfortable rhetoric into meaningful and timely action. In that regard, Trump’s ignorant blunderings can inadvertently be a force for good. Channelled positively, it could yet oblige the rest of us to forego our increasing reliance on speculative technologies and incremental carbon prices and begin to shape a mitigation agenda that is fit for purpose. We need to take Trump at face value. If he is successful in returning the US to a coal-based economy (and that looks unlikely), then the European Union needs to borrow his ‘protectionist’ cloak and put in place carbon standards for imported goods.
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Benjamin Santer, climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California:
In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Brutus said these famous lines: "There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries." Today, the United States pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and missed the rising tide. Far from "Making America Great Again", this decision condemns the United States to becoming one of the 'has-beens' of history. We will become increasingly irrelevant to the rest of the world. They are going forward; we are going backward.
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http://www.nature.com/news/how-scientists-reacted-to-the-us-leaving-the-paris-climate-agreement-1.22098
