“It is the equivalent of saying what science has done in the last half century is unimportant.”
ORONO, Maine — Long before most of us had even heard of climate change, Paul Mayewski was studying it.
As a professor and climate scientist at the University of Maine and, until recently, the director of the school’s highly regarded Climate Change Institute, Mayewski has taught graduate students, worked with researchers from many different countries, and traveled the world doing field research.
Most of that fieldwork took him to remote places where he extracted core ice samples from glaciers. Those samples provided a look at centuries of climate change driven by natural phenomena (such as volcanic eruptions) and by human activities (such as greenhouse gas emissions).
Although he’s been a climate scientist for more than half a century, Mayewski has lost none of his enthusiasm, especially for expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica, to Greenland and the Andes and the Himalayas.
“I really want to be able to do these things for as long as I can, and thus far it’s worked,” he said. “Being in the field, in particular with students, is a fantastic experience. It’s just as if you were starting over every single time.”
Although the work has never been more critical, climate scientists face political challenges they never imagined.
The Trump administration has slashed funding for research and removed from government websites references to human-caused climate change. President Trump has called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
“Unlike the previous administration, the Trump [Environmental Protection Agency] is focused on protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback, not left-wing political agendas,” the EPA press secretary wrote in an email this week to the Washington Post.
“As such,” she added, “this agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult.”
What is Mayewski’s view of how the United States is now addressing climate change?
“I guess the mildest way to say it is it’s very disappointing. It is in many ways the equivalent of saying that what science has done and discovered in the last half century is unimportant in this particular field.”
Few other advanced countries have gone down the same path.
“We’re really alone,” Mayewski said. “Literally everybody else believes that climate change is important.”
“It’s not even a matter of believing it. It’s happening—you can experience it on a daily basis, flying an aircraft, dealing with weather, dealing with an increased number of catastrophes, drought, all of these things. To not realize that these are important, and that the way we deal with them is important, is sad.”