March for Science to be held

March+for+Science+to+be+held

by Nicole Chen, Features Editor

Multiple scientists and science organizations have announced their support for a march for science, particularly to raise awareness regarding the Trump administration’s proposed plans regarding climate change and energy.

Reddit users proposed the idea of a march for science in a discussion about the effect of Trump’s administration on science.

A Facebook page supporting the cause was launched on Jan. 24, and it has since reached more than 300,000 likes.

“Mr. Trump has dismissed it as a hoax and a conspiracy engineered by the Chinese in order to diminish US economic competitiveness. That is simply wrong and dangerously so. He has called for ‘cancelling the Paris Climate Agreement’, and if that happened, it would send the wrong message to the rest of the world,” said Benjamin Santer, climate researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National University. “It would tell them ‘This is not a serious problem. We don’t care about it in the United States, and you should not care about it either.’ That would impede, in my opinion, effective solutions to the problem of human caused climate change and make it much more difficult to avoid dangerous human interference with the climate system.”

The march’s Twitter account announced that it will be held on Earth Day, April 22. Marches will be held in multiple cities throughout the nation, including San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

Organizers of the events say that the main purpose of these events is to fight the Trump administration’s stance against science research. The events on April 22 in the Washington march will include a march as well as a teach-in at the National Mall.

“Recent policy changes have caused heightened worry among scientists, and the incredible and immediate outpouring of support has made clear that these concerns are also shared by hundreds of thousands of people around the world,” organizers of the march wrote on its website. “It is time for people who support scientific research and evidence-based policies to take a public stand and be counted.”

Many members of Trump’s administration and cabinet have publicly stated that they deny the legitimacy of human-caused climate change.

Trump’s nominee for Department of Energy head, Rick Perry, said in 2011 at a breakfast event in New Hampshire that he does not believe in global warming and suggested that scientists were manipulating statistics for financial benefits.

“Your entire life’s work, and then someone comes along, who’s perhaps read a few blogs on the Internet and dismisses everything that you’ve done and everything that the scientific community has done as a hoax or a conspiracy,” Santer said. “How would you feel about that? Not very good, probably. That’s the frustration that 97 percent of the scientific community concurs that warming is real and humans are culpable in a large part of the historical warming that we’ve observed since the Industrial Revolution.”

The San Francisco sister march is planned to take place from 9 a.m. to noon on April 22.

This piece was originally published in the pages of The Winged Post on February 21, 2017.