Roughly eight years ago, I received a strange call from a national lab where I had just secured ‘in kind’ support—instrument time—to analyze shells, tiny foraminifera, I grew in a lab. My proposal abstract was fairly technical, but its first sentence was clear: the shells I grew are essential for studying Earth’s Climate History.
This is what the lab was calling to address: I used the word “climate” in my abstract. Donald Trump had just been elected and the lab, under the US Department of Energy, called to ask me to remove the word “climate” from my abstract. I wasn’t alone. Other researchers had received similar requests. Discussions on an online forum for scientists suggested many more researchers received such requests, but these went unreported, folks were too nervous to speak out.
As the Trump administration took office, it appeared that this was part of a broader effort to erase climate change from the public consciousness. Government websites on climate change were quietly deleted or heavily edited to soften the Administration’s stance on climate change. A group tracked which websites were modified and how. To be sure, it isn’t unusual for an administration to modify government website content to better align with policy, and in fact the Biden administration later reinstated many of those websites. But it appeared that the Trump administration was trying to scrub climate change from existence.
Here we are—eight years later—still grappling with a political establishment determined to deny reality. In Florida—one of the state’s most vulnerable to climate change impacts—leaders seek to erase the lessons on climate change from textbooks. Florida, like other southeast states, is still recovering from two back-to-back devastating hurricanes, which experts predict will become more frequent and damaging as atmospheric CO2 levels rise and temperatures soar. Yet, in response to the threat of climate on his state, Governor Ron DeSantis has taken to signing bills that remove mentions of climate change and nullify the states former clean energy goals. He later framed his efforts as a battle against “radical green zealots”
Oh, Ron, it’s not radical zealots we need to worry about. It’s the hurricanes, the floods, the fires. It’s the future world we are hurtling toward—a world where ignoring reality won’t stop the storms from coming.
With another election around the corner, we are once again at a crossroads. We face the possibility of electing politicians who continue to pretend climate change doesn’t exist. They hope that by removing it from textbooks and bills, deleted it from government websites, and scrubbing it from scientific abstracts, the problem will disappear.
But climate change is not something that can simply be erased. If we stop teaching climate change, students will grow up unprepared for the challenges they’ll inherit. If we stop talking about it, the critical solutions we so desperately need will be needlessly delayed. The problem will persist, even if the language disappears.
Instead, we should be working to strengthen climate science education so that we can tackle climate change head on. Climate educated voters would then fully understand why our future world may have heavier storms, more floods, droughts and fires, and greater potential for devastating hurricanes. And, importantly, folks would fully understand that the technology to manufacture hurricanes simply does not exist, as some have suggested on X. Learning about Earth’s natural climate history, information that often comes from the very shells I study, would provide a much needed ‘paleo’-perspective on natural climate variability and a clear picture of what a warmer, higher CO2 world might look like.
Pretending climate change isn’t real won’t save us, but understanding it—and preparing for it—just might.
