Burning Books: America’s about to lose its MJO—and the White House doesn’t care

The NCAR Mesa Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. Designed by I.M. Pei to resemble an ancient cliff dwelling. It has served as a global fortress for atmospheric research since 1967.

Weather experts call it the MJO, short for Madden-Julian Oscillation. And it’s important. The MJO influences global weather in the form of rainfall, monsoons and tropical cyclones from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, Atlantic and Americas.

If you’re in the business of predicting weather and climatic catastrophes, the MJO is where it starts. Let's hope the dismantling of the NCAR is not where it ends.

What is the MJO and why is NCAR being dismantled?

In the seventies two brilliant American atmospheric scientists, Dr. Roland Madden and Dr. Paul Julian, came up with the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) in the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, and it’s been one of the fundamental tools for measuring climate change over nearly 50 years. In short, highly practical research of benefit to all of mankind.

Just before Christmas, Donald Trump ordered that NCAR be dismantled on the grounds that it was a hotbed of “climate alarmism” in America. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists begged to differ, saying that the White House is destroying “one of the crown jewels of the US scientific enterprise”, but their view won’t carry any weight in today’s Washington.

The burning question is why. Why would a president shut down an organisation that is doing so much good for the planet and whose research brilliantly reflects the best and brightest minds in his own country?

Actually, the answer’s obvious. First, Trump is uncomfortable with people more intelligent than himself and who possess a higher knowledge (and that’s not hard). The condition’s got a name: anti-intellectualism. Second, he’s in thrall to big oil, which is why the White House has just lowered emission standards on combustion-engined vehicles. And third, as he told the UN, climate change is a “con job”.

This level of determined ignorance is a classic instance of history repeating — reminiscent of Hitler’s burning of books whose content didn’t suit the Nazis’ deliberately erroneous view of German history and thought. Trump’s just the latest in a long line of populist leaders who denounce knowledge that doesn’t advance their political or personal ambitions.

A History of State-Sponsored Ignorance

In medieval England Kings Henry VIII and Edward VI supported the destruction of entire libraries and texts in an organised assault on Catholic churches, nunneries and monasteries in the name of a campaign they coined the Reformation, although it was little more than a general looting of wealth — a recurring theme in the history of financial upheaval.

Jumping forward a few hundred years, during the Spanish civil war of the thirties dictator General Franco ordered the killing of about 200,000 civilians including scientists, teachers, artists, writers and academics, all in the name of anti-intellectualism. He was backed by the church, army and rural interests who feared the rise of working people.

During the Cambodian genocide of the late 1970s the totalitarian Khmer Rouge government of Pol Pot oversaw the deaths of nearly all the country’s educated people for the deranged purpose of restoring a rural revolution. And most recently, Afghanistan’s Taliban regime delights in dynamiting historic sites and suppressing knowledge it doesn’t like, notably for the education of women.

To put it mildly, the current American president is not a thoughtful man. He probably doesn’t know, for instance, that the electricity that keeps the lights on over the White House harks back to the experiments of one of his country’s greatest intellectuals, Benjamin Franklin. Or that the origins of the cellphone to which he’s addicted lie with Alexander Graham Bell, another American scientist. Or that it’s MJO and other atmospheric science that helps keep Air Force One in the air.

It’s a characteristic of the anti-intellectual movement as exhibited by the late Charlie Kirk that it insists it’s not knowledge that matters so much as what is perceived. And anyway, intellectuals aren’t real. They are just theorists with no practical sense and should be kept out of any meaningful role in public life. That’s why Trump has sacked thousands of scientists.

Even before NCAR got the Trump treatment, the scientists in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies were evicted from their offices in New York City, and Princeton University’s flagship research project for modelling the earth’s system lost its federal funding.

The Rise of Modern Anti-Intellectualism

Americans should have seen this coming. During Trump’s first term, a reputable pollster found that most Republicans believed college and university education were bad for the United States. And what’s the result? An explosion of fake news culminating in the fairy tales spewed out by Trump Social. That’s why nearly three quarters of Republican senators don’t believe the planet is warming up.

And they’ve probably never heard of the MJO.

Photo credit: en:user:Daderot, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons