“The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time,” said British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey to a friend as they watched London street lamps being extinguished in the late summer of 1914, on the eve of World War I.
Public optimism sparked by exciting new technologies like aviation and wireless telegraphy was smashed by that appalling war, and it didn’t recover until after World War II, over 30 years later.
It’s been a bumpy ride ever since – natural and man-made disasters broken by moments of peace and levity – but there was at least the illusion of progress driven by expanding scientific knowledge. Thanks to climate science we learned about human-induced climate change, and data centres around the world, importantly in the US, have kept us informed about the threat.
But the lamps of knowledge are dimming in Donald Trump’s America. National climate assessments, many of them legally mandated, have now started to disappear from public websites. Last week the White House announced that missing climate data and assessments will be held by NASA but gave no further details. Associated Press reported that subsequent searches on NASA websites drew a blank.
Withdrawing climate information is just one of numerous cutbacks by a regime that has not attempted to hide its contempt for the science of climate change and its disbelief in its findings. At every turn it has sought to discredit research that has long been accepted, however reluctantly, by governments everywhere.
Trump’s hostility towards science has affected numerous US government policies around health, environment and land management, among others, but climate change has been strongly targeted. In a world increasingly shaken by bad news, the Trump administration has predictably sought to eliminate the research that delivers it.
Poor weather forecasting was blamed by Texas state officials for the high death toll in catastrophic floods last week. Weather forecasts, like climate projections, rely on highly complex, resource-intensive modelling. That cost made them a target for Trump’s cuts. About 600 National Weather Service staff were sacked during the purges.
US cuts to research spending affects science everywhere. The sensitivity of Australian climate research to any funding cuts, including Antarctic programs based in Hobart, is strongly reflected in two research stories from last week.
Australia, which manages three stations requiring summer supply voyages to East Antarctica, is well-placed geographically to investigate the ocean crossed by its ships. A paper published early July in the highly-respected international journal PNAS, by a team led by Edward Doddridge of the University of Tasmania, examined the implications of the current record low sea ice coverage around Antarctica, emphasising the imperative of year-round monitoring.
Until recently, the area of Antarctic sea ice at its October peak was larger than Antarctica itself. Recent record-low sea ice cover has seen greater numbers of icebergs – a sign of increasing ice loss from the continent itself. Sea ice has historically limited ocean warming and protected Antarctica’s coast from wave erosion, thus helping to restrain the flow of its vast ice sheet into the ocean.
In these pages on Thursday Matt King, director of the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science (ACEAS) centred at the University of Tasmania (UTAS) lamented the threatened loss of continuity in data collection and assessment because of funding cuts.
As King pointed out, the icebreaking ability of Australia’s Antarctic research ship Nuyina made it possible to conduct field work that transformed our knowledge of the remote Denman Glacier, roughly south of Perth, “from one of the most poorly observed places on Earth to something we finally could begin to understand.”
A decade-long hiatus in ship-based coastal ice research created a knowledge gap, said King, at a time when the Antarctic experienced “dramatic sea-ice reduction, a massive slowdown in ocean circulation, 30C heatwaves and a collapsed ice shelf.”
Discovered by Australian explorers in 1912, Denman glacier had not been visited for over a century when a 2020 US-led study found a canyon in underlying rock extending down 3.5 km below sea level, making the glacier especially susceptible to melting from below by warming ocean waters. The 2024 Nuyina visit found melting already well under way.
Mention melting Antarctic ice to anyone living on a Pacific atoll and you’ll get an immediate response. Thousands of Tuvaluans have put up their hands to emigrate to Australia because they can already see early signs of their homeland going under.
People everywhere living on the edge are familiar with climate chaos, but in Trumpworld they just don’t want to know about it. So they’re switching off the lights.