Signal From Noise: The Importance of Basic Science

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The United States government has historically played a critical role in funding climate science research. Innumerable daily resources, from weather apps and automated storm warnings to the flood and fire risk data that inform home insurance pricing, owe their existence at least in part to federal support. This research, however, is now at risk. The Donald Trump administration has proposed deep cuts to basic research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA, and rescinded federal climate research grants to universities. Reasonable people may differ on the best ways to address climate change, but these cuts will hamper science’s ability to understand what is happening at all.

Basic research is what teases signal from noise, isolating the significant from the arbitrary to develop a clearer understanding of the changing climate. A recent paper, for example, reviewed findings from multiple fields to determine the health of the vast ice sheets in Greenland, West Antarctica, and East Antarctica, which collectively hold enough water to raise global sea levels by nearly sixty-five meters. It found that even the most robust of these sheets, the East Antarctic, was vulnerable to collapse at just 2° to 3°C (3.6° to 5.4°F) of warming—the level of warming the planet is now on track to experience. Greenland and the West Antarctic are in danger at just 1.5°C (2.7°F). And even at today’s temperatures—1.2°C (2.2°F) above preindustrial levels—ice loss from these sheets has quadrupled since the 1990s, and could generate more than one centimeter of sea level rise per year by the end of this century.

Humanity, as a species, is notoriously bad at understanding incremental change over time. Like the proverbial frog, people find it difficult to perceive a gradually warming pot. A centimeter per year of sea level rise by 2100 might sound small and far away, but 2100 is just seventy-five years from now. Mid-century modern design and nuclear power are both about that old. Major landmarks of American infrastructure are older still. Chicago’s elevated trains began running more than 130 years ago, in 1892, and the Brooklyn Bridge finished rising over the East River in 1883. New Orleans’ famous streetcars first plied St. Charles Avenue nearly two hundred years ago, in 1835, and the oldest public building in the United States, the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has been in continuous operation for more than four centuries. Measured against the lifespans of what humanity builds, seventy-five years is an infancy.

Centimeters, moreover, add up. The best-case scenario outlined in the review paper—one centimeter of sea level rise per year—is fast enough to overwhelm normal adaptation approaches like building seawalls or restoring shorelines. With current warming trends set to far outpace that scenario, one survey found that many experts anticipate over two meters of sea level rise by 2100, enough to inundate the homes of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Cutting research funding won’t stop the water from rising. Physics, with apologies to John Adams, is a stubborn thing. But these cuts, if realized, will make it harder for Americans to see and understand what’s happening. It will make building today’s infrastructure—the roads and bridges and trains and subways that will carry this country into the next century—riskier and more expensive. It will put people’s lives and livelihoods at risk. A certain degree of sea level rise is now inevitable, but blindness to it is a choice. One that that the United States makes at its peril.