Denial of science, real threat to all life on Earth

Back in October, the US administration announced a plan to divert water to California farmers in order to fulfill a campaign promise made by the president.

On Feb 20, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, the California Natural Resources Agency and the California Environmental Protection Agency filed a lawsuit against the administration for failing to protect endangered fish species from operations to divert water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

Becerra said the administration was adopting "scientifically challenged biological opinions that push species to extinction and harm our natural resources and waterways".

Given the administration's broader policies that charge applies not just to fish and waterways but to all species, homo sapiens included, and the environment as a whole.

For at a time when misinformation is calling into question the validity of facts, the US administration is leading the way in denying and obfuscating the scientific evidence of human-induced climate change and the biodiversity crisis for which we are culpable.

Despite being completely dependent on the outcomes of scientific inquiry for our place in the world today, for better or worse, the findings of science are seemingly unremarkable and discardable to many, including, most notably the US administration and its payrollers.

This is most conspicuous, of course, when it comes to environmental issues, on which the US administration presents science-denying opinions as a way to discredit any obstacle to the pursuit of power and profit.

The evidence that is piling up indicating we are on the brink of a climate and biodiversity emergency. Our inability to take meaningful action to avert a catastrophe is evidence of the fact that although we have acquired ever more knowledge about the world we inhabit, that has not been accompanied by greater awareness of our responsibilities to it. The US administration is simply doubling down by widening the gap between the two.

Adding to the growing pile of evidence countering the claims of the US administration that climate change is something invented by China as a way to take advantage of the US－which in its contempt for reality is really quite remarkable－it was reported toward the end of last month that scientists had found the Colorado River is drying up due to climate change and NASA released satellite images showing dramatic ice melt in Antarctica, supporting the record-high temperature readings from Esperanza Base, a year-round Argentine research center on the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula.

March 3 was World Wildlife Day, a day to celebrate the world's biodiversity and reflect on the cause of the biological annihilation that is underway, the sixth great extinction of which we are the cause. If we are not to go the same way as the flora and fauna for which we have been the end of history, we now need to protect nature, rather than ruthlessly exploiting it as we have been doing.

Unfortunately, contrary to that imperative for survival, the fossil-fueled US administration is silencing experts and taking away funding from any agency or organization that may produce data confirming climate change and biodiversity loss is real and driven by human actions.

The Columbia Law School has documented hundreds of instances of the administration preventing research findings from being made public, and recorded the huge serial funding cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other environmental bodies.

Although as Mark Twain noted, one of the fascinating things about science is that one gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact that we are facing an existential crisis caused by our own behavior is not conjecture, no matter what investment the US administration makes in trying to fabricate evidence to the contrary.

The author is a senior editor with China Daily.