Ben Santer: We Need Understanding, Not Physical Walls, to Address Climate Change

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

h/t Dr. Willie Soon – University of East Anglia alumni Ben “Beat the cr*p out of him” Santer offering President Trump lessons on fostering international cooperation, shared humanity, mutual understanding and the need to focus on climate action rather than building physical walls.

Ultima Thule, the Cold War and Trump’s Wall

As I learned during my youth in Germany, exploring frontiers beats hiding behind barriers

By Ben Santer on January 11, 2019

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[snip – a minute of my life I will never get back]

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Today, we are told, Americans need a wall on our southern border. We are told that we need the wall to keep us safe from rapists and terrorists; from those who are not like us, who speak differently, or do not look like we do.

Back in Cornwall School in 1966, I was “the other.” I was different in my nationality, in my speech and in my religion. For that younger me, safety and security did not come from building metaphorical walls between myself and my peers. Security came from listening, from learning, from seeking understanding of a world that was new to me.

Those lessons seem relevant today.

True security for our country does not come from building a wall on our southern border, or from asking Canada to pay for a wall on our northern border, or from withdrawing into our own little national cocoon. National security in a complex and rapidly changing world is best guaranteed by strong alliances, shared humanity and an accurate understanding of how and why political, economic and environmental changes are occurring. Keeping our country safe from harm requires awareness of the reality and seriousness of human effects on global climate. It requires a willingness to work with the rest of the world in finding innovative clean-energy solutions to the existential threat of human-caused climate change. No physical wall can fully protect us from that threat.

Read more: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/ultima-thule-the-cold-war-and-trumps-wall/

Ben Santer has an interesting background for a climate peacemaker.

Aside from his bizarre physical threat against Pat Michaels, Ben Santer wrote emails describing being audited by Steve McIntyre as the 21st century equivalent of public hanging (Climategate email 3356.txt), and complained about “scientific competitors” using FOIA requests to access datasets before he was finished with them (Climategate email 1231257056.txt).

Santer expressed concern about intentional or unintentional “misuse” of datasets by scientists who disagreed with his position (Climategate email 1229468467.txt). He wrote an apology to colleagues when McIntyre forced him to publish some of his data (Climategate email 1229468467.txt).

Ben Santer put his foot in it when he said in 2011, that periods of 17 years or more are required to identify the human footprint in the climate record. When 17 years came and went without any rise in temperature. Santer in 2015 tried to explain the pause as being due to lots of small volcanoes suppressing the anthropogenic signal.

But I guess anyone can grow and learn.