When the science journal Nature surveyed more than 2,000 scientists last month about the 2024 presidential election, 86 percent said they preferred Vice President Kamala Harris over former president Donald Trump. Because of Trump’s anti-scientific views on issues like climate change and public health, these experts worried that a second Trump term would put millions of innocent lives at risk.
Now that the Republican nominee has won, scientists are bracing for the worst. Speaking to Salon, these experts reiterated one theme over and over again: This was an election between science and ignorance of science, and the ignorant side — which serves special interest groups like the fossil fuel industry — has prevailed.
Perhaps the most conspicuous instance of this is climate change. Trump himself denies that burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gasses that heat the atmosphere and ocean. His proxies, like Tucker Carlson and JD Vance, have respectively blamed abortion for causing freak hurricanes or have dismissed climate science as “weird.” Last month, climate scientists told Salon they were concerned about the future of the planet if Trump prevailed precisely because of his hostility to climate science and (perhaps not coincidentally) his coziness with fossil fuel companies.
“There has been a huge gap between what climate scientists know and what the public knows, over decades and even under Democratic administrations,” Dr. Peter Kalmus, a NASA climate scientist who emphasized his opinions are his own. “That huge gap will grow far larger under this new administration, which will use federal resources to join the oil, coal and gas industries in spreading disinformation.”
Trump campaigned on a promise to fire thousands of civil servants and replace them with loyalists, with a particular focus on those purging anyone who tells the truth that climate change is overwhelmingly caused by human use of fossil fuels. Kalmus cited this with alarm, arguing that it is done to make it impossible for environmental regulators and science educators to effectively do their jobs. Even worse, Kalmus said, Trump and his economic adviser Tesla CEO Elon Musk are going to take the ax to countless unrelated science initiatives that run afoul of their political positions.
“In the U.S., science is currently funded to a large extent by the federal government,” Kalmus explained. “People with means who value science should seriously consider setting up new foundations and other alternate funding instruments to keep critical science and science communication, especially for climate, alive during dark times.”
University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael E. Mann was even more blunt than Kalmus, saying that Trump will turn America into a “petrostate.”
“As I stated before the election, a second Trump term, which includes implementation of Project 2025, is the end of climate action as we know it, this decade,” Mann said. “And if Trump dismantles our democracy, as many fear will be the case, and the world’s greatest power, the U.S., becomes — in essence — a petrostate, it’s game over for climate action full stop for the foreseeable future, unless the rest of the world unites and takes bold action, including potentially the most punitive possible sanctions against the United States.”
One climate scientist believes that the writing was on the wall when Trump was first elected in 2016. Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist worked for the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and has published more than 600 articles on climatology, wrote in 2019 that he and his wife left the United States for New Zealand because of Trump and the Republican Party’s stances on issues like gun control and school shootings, which is also a public health crisis. Yet climate change also played a role in their decision, with the Trump administration’s decisions making it clear to Trenberth that the United States was an increasingly unwelcome place for scientists.
“Trump is a lying, convicted felon and a fascist threat,” Trenberth said. “He offered a message of xenophobia and misogyny and racism, of cruelty and darkness and hate. His lies were incredible, and it is terrible to see that Americans have not seen through him. This is very gloomy for those who believe in science, the rule of law, and in right and wrong. It undermines confidence in any leadership from the U.S. on international affairs.”
Drawing attention to Trump’s opposition to multinational organizations like NATO and the European Union, as well as his closeness to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trenberth argued all of these details can be connected to Trump’s climate change denialism. Like his support for the NRA and support for policies that give money to wealthy businesses, Trenberth says they are all part of an agenda that disregards scientific evidence to serve the interests of plutocrats.
“He plans to take the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement again,” Trenberth said, referring to the international agreement to reduce emissions that Trump pulled the U.S from early in his first term. President Joe Biden rejoined the agreement when he was elected. Trenberth said Trump “is an utter disaster for addressing climate change and pulling nations together for much needed leadership on environmental matters and other topics. He certainly won’t Make American Great, but rather will find the U.S. increasingly isolated and at odds with most others.”
America’s impending estrangement from the scientific community will not be limited to the issue of climate change. Ahmed Gaya — who works as director of the Climate Justice Collaborative at the National Partnership for New Americans, a national coalition of 83 state and local immigrant and refugee organizations — explained to Salon that these pseudoscientific policies are specifically targeted against immigrants.
“For the climate justice movement, this means a dual fight — not only to resist the rollback of environmental protections but also to defend vulnerable immigrant communities against harmful exclusionary policies,” Gaya said. “At the same time we need to build a compelling alternative to Trump’s vision of walls, cages and guns, that invests in people’s ability to stay resilient in their communities, and provides safe, orderly pathways to refuge when they cannot.”
Throughout the 2024 election, Trump vilified immigrants and claimed that Americans’ hardships could be traced to various unflattering traits (such as criminality) that he ascribed to them. According to Gaya, this is part of the larger authoritarian pattern of distracting people from climate change by blaming vulnerable communities.
“Over the next four years, the climate movement must stand immutably and materially against xenophobia and use every tool at its disposal to resist Trump's proposed mass deportation scheme and other attacks on immigrant and refugee communities,” Gaya said. “This will likely include repurposing the legal and organizing strategies that defeated coal-fired power plants and tar-sands pipelines to stop the construction of mass detention facilities and border militarization.”
Even as Trump supporters cite racist theories to justify persecuting people and ignoring the extreme weather caused by climate change, Gaya argued that “climate advocates must also work with migrant justice leaders and climate-displaced people to propose a positive alternative to border militarization that promotes both people's resilience to stay in their homes and orderly, safe pathways to refuge for those who cannot.”
To the extent that there is any coherence to the Trump platform on science, it is that it will double down on policies that will make Earth harder to inhabit for future generations, not to mention the ongoing “biological holocaust” happening to the natural world.
“Trump and Project 2025 have pledged to expand fossil fuels as rapidly as possible which is a worst-case scenario for irreversible global overheating,” Kalmus said. “Unfortunately, a majority has voted for climate chaos and that’s what they’re going to get.”
