John Dalton, a big-thinking Quaker, met John Gough, a blind natural philosopher, in 1781 when Dalton took a job as a teaching assistant in Kendal, England. Just 15 years old, Dalton was impressed by Gough, who spoke Latin, Greek, French and English and understood mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine and meteorology. Dalton took note of Gough's habit of jotting down daily reports on the weather and began doing the same. He continued doing it, making observations about the weather every day of his life, including the last one in his late seventies.
A pragmatic scientist, Dalton built his own measuring instruments – barometers, rain gauges, thermometers. He designed tables of wind, humidity, barometric pressure and rainfall. He described air phenomena, like the northern lights, snow and thunder. When he moved to Manchester it was not unusual to see him walking the smoky streets of England's booming textile center or hiking through the surrounding valleys and up the adjoining hills, gathering samples of air in various kinds of weather.
"You can sometimes collect snow still lying high in the hills and keep it for a day or two in a basket for experiments," he wrote. For fun and science Dalton ducked into the shop of a textile dyer, where the temperature might be 100 degrees F. Instantly sweating, he watched the rapid condensation of water vapor inside a collection bottle.
At the time, little was known about water vapor in the air. Today, we know it's the key to the water cycle that unites the sky to our oceans and affects climate change.
Now, over 200 years later, we also know that the Republican view of atmospheric science is like John Dalton looking at his bottle, smashing it and saying, "Rubbish." Except the Republicans also want to smash the institution, the dye house of knowledge, that allows the John Daltons of our time to make discoveries and learn how the evolving world works. They want to mock and belittle the scientists collecting air samples, ice cores and data about climate change weather.
The Republican leaders in Congress, led by Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, consider the rubbish not worth funding. In fact, Smith and his supporters, including coal baron Robert E. Murray, want to shift science back to the pre-Dalton and pre-industrial era, before coal and oil became the fuels of the future.
If the Republicans expand their power and continue the trends they endorse, we'll probably hear some of them calling for the burning of scientists, environmentalists and nonbelievers at the stake. As economic terrorists.
Being at COP21 in Paris, it is hard not to draw another conclusion: the Dark Age Republican mind set is glowing in America, but nowhere else. You sure don't see it at this gathering, which is forging a new path forward and facing climate change, rather than retreating backwards.
As California Governor Jerry Brown said Sunday at a Global Landscapes Forum, what's going on in Paris "is the biggest thing for climate change ever." The issue is "a relentless challenge. You can't get tired. We need fewer silos, more holistic connectivity. This is a lifetime test," he said. And just maybe, Brown said, adding an oft missing observation from the official declarations of the conference, in the long run "the importance of a grassroots revolution" may outweigh the official decisions made here by politicians and their negotiators.
From the Republican candidates seeking the presidency in America, Europeans get the impression that America's main goal for the future has nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with shaping a nation of gun-totting patriots, with few if any restraints against psychopaths of all stripes buying war-caliber rifles along with bullets and protective armor, and guarding our borders against all immigrants who must be terrorists if they've ever talked with someone named Mohammed.
The tough-guy language and knee-jerk shutdown of civil liberties, which many Americans swallow today like fast food for the fearful, is also plentiful in France. People in both nations are distraught and sickened by the scale of the killings, the death of innocent people, the grief and anxiety. But France has a population of over 6 million Muslims and a three-week-old slaughter of over 130 people on its hands. It remains in a prolonged State of Emergency Declaration, which it uses to justify a prolonged crackdown on public demonstrations.
Despite the oppressive political atmosphere in France, at the COP21 events and venues that I have attended, the John Daltons rule. Lamar Smith, Robert E. Murray and their presidential timber led by Ted Cruz ("We need a plan for a decisive action for victory over evil") and just-nuke-'em Donald Trump are viewed as out of touch, out of time, and totally out of ideas by many Europeans. The thinking of such leaders is like a bad smell they cherish. It's the stink of power, of inequality, which they embody. It's the smoke of coal, which is strangling the future with carbon. It's the glory of money, the element of our carbon-overloaded world that the Republicans have aplenty.
Let's give them credit for that. But can't they spend it on helping the future, rather than propping up the past? On learning some science rather than chest beating.
John Dalton's greatest discovery as a scientist was the law of partial pressures. He defined partial pressure as the nature of the atoms in one gas to repel its own atoms but not to repel the atoms of other gases. In other words, the atoms of gases distribute themselves evenly among one another.
There's a similar law at work in politics now. It has to do with the members of one political party repelling the members of all other parties. This law is not unique to America, but we embody it to a startling degree. Not that the Democratic Party does not repel the Republicans to a degree that demands modification. But the Donkey party doesn't hold a candle to the Elephants when it comes to magnitude of distain.
Until the law of partial political pressures again prevails in the U.S. Congress, with members of both parties distributing themselves among one another and achieving something called unity of purpose, the view of America from Paris, from Europe, from most of the world will reveal a once-great nation that has lost its way and become a parody of greatness: a floundering token of retrograde thinking led by anti-Daltonism, anti-futurism, anti-humanism.
It makes an American with one foot on science and the other on history want to bow his head and be thankful that at least the rest of the planet isn't fighting itself or fearful and angry about climate change or as wired up about terrorism as America. And to work for a sea change in leadership with a new sensitivity and the stamina demanded by climate change which will intensify during the lives of all our children.
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