LEWISTON, Maine - Sometime today, President-elect Donald Trump can expect to receive an open letter from more than 700 U.S. physics and astronomy faculty about the need for science to inform national policy such as climate change and nuclear proliferation.
The effort was organized by Professor Paul Nakroshis of the University of Southern Maine, with help from two Bowdoin professors. Nakroshis says when Trump won the election he felt like he needed to do something "because the way he spoke about climate change made me very nervous because he seemed to think it was a hoax and that it wasn't something we needed to be concerned about."
Nakroshis is an associate professor of physics. Climate change is not his expertise. And so he says he reached out to Mark Battle and Madeleine Msall who have been studying it at Bowdoin to help him draft a letter and recruit their colleagues around the country to sign it.
"We have 706 signatories from almost every state in the country," he says, "including four Nobel Prize winners and numerous people who study climate change."
In addition to writing a letter to let Trump know that the scientific consensus about climate change is clear, the professors took to social media to share their concerns.
"Climate data going back to President Millard Fillmore's term (1850) clearly show the planet is now warmer than ever," the scientists tweeted to @realDonaldTrump today (Thursday). And they reminded Trump that scientists are "highly confident" that human use of fossil fuels is the dominant driver of global warming.
Madeleine Msall of Bowdon says, "Climate change is often in the news, but the best analysis doesn't always catch public attention." And that's why the physics and astronomy professors took the unusual step of using Twitter to make their case to the President-elect.
"We wanted people to realize that those who can be informed readers of the science really trust the science community," Msall says, "and to hope that we could use our status in the community as knowledgeable people to speak out for a fact-based approach."
The letter's release comes the day after it was announced that 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded on the planet.
