Source: A Climate Reckoning Is Coming for the Next President – The Atlantic
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A second Trump presidency is the open question looming over climate science. Given that global warming is still yet to be reined in, how damaging could four years of Trump be to our collective climate outcome? The answer may be both less fatalistic and more complex than that a president wedded to fossil fuels will condemn the world to significantly worse warming. The short of it, according to two distinguished climate scientists I spoke with, is this: Trump’s four years would surely be damaging, but wouldn’t doom the planet. A public reckoning is coming whether he wins or not, and Trump’s hostile posture on climate could sap U.S. ambitions in a future where geopolitical power is likely to align with a country’s capacity to power itself.
Ramanathan is a distinguished professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. He expects that another Trump term will make the world more confused and chaotic. But he also expects that, sometime this decade, regardless of who is president in 2025, the public will inevitably come to its senses about the dangers of climate change—out of sheer fear of how climate-addled our lives are becoming—and demand the type of radical change needed to reach zero emissions.
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