A day after President Donald Trump’s choice for the White House’s top environmental official expressed doubts over the link between human activity and climate change, an event at Fort Lewis College targeted exactly that argument.
“I’m not a scientist, but in my personal capacity, I have many questions that remain unanswered by current climate policy,” Trump’s nominee to lead the Council on Environmental Quality, Kathleen Hartnett White, said Wednesday.
The Washington Post reported that Hartnett White told the Senate at her confirmation hearing that, “I think we indeed need to have more precise explanations of the human role and the natural role.”
Had Hartnett White attended FLC’s “Symposium on Climate Change” on Thursday, she may have had some of those questions on climate change answered repeatedly.
There, more than 200 people crowded into the Student Union Ballroom to hear from distinguished local and national scientists, whose studies focus on climate change and its impact on the planet.
“It makes me happy to know I work at an institute that takes climate change seriously,” said Steven Elias, dean of the FLC School of Business Administration.
Since Trump took office in January, he has continually challenged the concept of climate change and rolled back important measures that aim to curb the global rise in temperatures.
Among other actions, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, worked to undo the Clean Power Plan and removed any mention of climate change on the Environmental Protection Agency’s website, barring scientists from reporting on the topic, according to multiple news reports.
Most recently, the White House challenged a scientific report from 13 federal agencies that concluded that humans are the main driver of global temperatures rising.
“The climate has changed and is always changing,” White House spokesman Ray Shah said Nov. 3 in response to the report.
It’s these very “myths” that many of the presentations at FLC on Thursday intended to dispel, said Ryan Haaland, professor and chairman of the college’s Physics & Engineering Department.
“The assertion that a variation in solar activity can warm the planet,” Haaland said, “that is a myth.”
The event also featured Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a federally funded research and development center based in Boulder.
Trenberth noted a well-used statistic: More than 97 percent of scientists agree the planet is warming at unprecedented rates and that it is largely driven by humans releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
“I won’t say anything about the other 3 percent,” Trenberth said. “There’s religious and other various reasons for that (doubting climate change).”
“But when you put it all together,” he continued, “there’s no doubt whatsoever that this is happening.”
Trenberth said the warmest 12 months on record occurred from September 2015 to August 2016, and the planet is already experiencing the effects of a hotter climate.
Trenberth said arctic sea ice in the summer has decreased by 40 percent, and by the 2030s, there will be no more sea ice in the arctic during the summers, opening up shipping routes.
“There will still be winter and snowfall,” he said. “But most (glaciers) around the world are retreating.”
Gary Gianniny, professor and chairman of the Department of Geosciences, said the argument that “the climate has changed before, so it’s not a big deal,” is a dangerous one.
“It is a big deal,” he said. “But it’s also an inherent part of our planet.”
Gianniny’s presentation drew the differences between past warming of the planet and the situation today, mainly how human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases have surpassed historic levels of emissions from volcanic activity.
All scientists agreed the time to take measures to limit fossil fuel emissions, and therefore climate change, is quickly passing.
“You either mitigate for it, plan for it, adapt to it or suffer the consequences,” Trenberth said. “We’re not planning for the consequences.”
jromeo@durangoherald.com
