Larry Wilson: On climate change, Trump is no King Canute

An American map showing the rapid increase in average winter temperatures across the United States published last week showed us by doing the numbers what we gardeners know in our bones: It’s getting toastier out there.

Not always toasty. There is still cold. Just a lot toastier than before.

Thirty-five years ago, when I bought my Pasadena garden (and a little cottage sitting on its edge), there were three or four regular overnight frosts, morning ice glistening on the rose bushes and the irises, every winter, and seven or eight in the different microclimate just down the hill, the floor of the Arroyo Seco canyon where the Rose Bowl is.

It’s been well over a decade since we have seen any frost at all.

The map published by Climate Central shows that our coastal zone of Southern California is an area that has seen average winter temps rise between 2 and 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970.

That’s not nearly as major a change as back East, where all of New England is in a zone where the winter lows are on average 5 degrees higher than 54 years ago.

This is not an issue of opinion. It doesn’t matter to the real world if a politician such as Donald Trump finds it convenient to pretend that “climate change is a hoax.” This winter numbers are just a small piece of the data pie showing this year to be the hottest ever. “The global mean surface air temperature from January to September 2024 was 1.54°C above the pre-industrial average. This is the first time the world has exceeded 1.5°C warming,” the World Meteorological Organization reports.

King Canute can command the tides to recede all he likes, but the rising tide pays no attention to his royal wishes. But the perhaps apocryphal story of the actual ancient English king, crowned in 1027, as told by his chronicler, Henry of Huntingdon, was meant to tell the opposite of how the story is now understood. After the tide kept coming up and dampened his shoes despite the command, Canute stepped back and declared, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.”

A king, or a president, can have no effect on global warming and other examples of climate change by commanding the atmosphere and the oceans to stop heating up. The laws of chemistry, and of physics, are eternal laws. But the president can, out of a desire to seem populist, or whatever reality-denying motive is at play here, once again withdraw our nation from The Paris Agreement, negotiated by 196 countries in 2015 “to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”

And surely once in office Trump will do just that.

It’s a national embarrassment, yet another one; it’s anti-human, as well as anti-Earth. For those of us who favor the Earth over, say, Mars, and who don’t want to leave our great-grandchildren an inhospitable home planet, it’s a disgusting political maneuver.

But that doesn’t mean that smart, everyday Americans will give up on our own fight against climate change, absurd as it is that the president’s likely action will see us join only a tiny group of countries, including Libya, Iran and Yemen, in the denialism.

We do contribute 13% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and American scientists, engineers and politicians of goodwill will continue to work to bring that number down, waiting out the Trump administration’s colossal error. As Max Boykoff, professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado says, yes, there will be “a loss of trust and a loss of opportunity for the U.S. to be in a position of leadership in a clean energy economy, and more generally on other global issues as well.”

But: “The renewable energy sector has grown to a point where it actually makes great financial sense to continue to benefit from these market trends. With the way the economy has been moving, the Trump administration’s withdrawal … may carry more symbolic significance than actual functional significance.” Keep up the good fight, even if this president is unlikely to attain the wisdom of the old king.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.