Reality is Not Written by the Victors

There’s an old adage that “History is written by the victors”. The origins of this adage are unclear. Some ascribe it to Winston Churchill. Others to Hermann Göring. Its roots probably lie deeper.

After the victory of Donald J. Trump in the U.S. Presidential election of November 2024, we are experiencing a modified version of this old saying: “Reality is written by the victors”.

Consider, if you will, the reality of human-caused climate change. We’ve known about this reality for a long time – since the pioneering work of Eunice Foote and John Tyndall in the mid-1800s. Foote and Tyndall understood the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. They understood that burning fossil fuels would increase carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. In the early 20^th century, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius calculated the likely global warming that would arise from doubling CO₂ levels. His estimate? A 4°C warming of the planet.

In 2025, with a measured surface warming of over 1.5°C, humanity is on track to get close to Arrhenius’s prediction. It’s not the kind of prediction you want to confirm.

The science is clear and compelling. Most of the increase in levels of heat-trapping CO₂ in Earth’s atmosphere, from roughly 280 parts per million in 1850 to over 420 parts per million today, is on us. This CO₂ increase is the signal of fossil fuel burning. We know this beyond a shadow of a doubt, from multiple independent lines of evidence.

But does such a small change in the chemical composition of Earth’s atmosphere affect our climate? Unfortunately, the answer is “yes”. As predicted by Arrhenius over 120 years ago, the increase in CO₂ since 1850 has driven global warming of the land surface. It has also warmed the oceans. Increased global sea level. Moistened the atmosphere. It has melted back sea ice, changed rainfall patterns, made ocean waters more acidic, and altered many other properties of the climate system.

How do scientists link these changes in climate to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide? How do they tease out the climate signals of fossil fuel burning from the signals of natural changes in the Sun’s energy output and volcanic eruptions? And how do they know that natural phenomena like El Niño and La Niña aren’t the sole cause of global warming?

Enter attribution science. It turns out that different human and natural influences on climate have different characteristic “fingerprints”. Fingerprints are patterns. They can be geographical patterns of climate change at Earth’s surface. They can be patterns that slice and dice the atmosphere, from the Earth’s surface to 50 km above it, near the top of the stratosphere. Fingerprints can also exploit the unique “time stamps” of different human and natural factors, such as the seasonal signature of human-caused ozone depletion.

The bottom line is simple. Fingerprinting tells us that a prominent claim made by President Trump – the claim that “Nobody really knows” whether climate change is real – is dead wrong. Climate change is real. It’s serious. It’s happening now. We’ve been measuring and monitoring it for over a century.

If we continue down our current fossil fuel intensive energy use pathway, there will be large changes in climate over the 21^st century. These changes will affect every aspect of our lives. They will affect our health. Our economies. Our food and water. Our exposure to droughts, floods, heatwaves, wildfires, and hurricanes. Where we can and cannot live safely.

Yet the reality of climate change is being redefined by the victors of the November 2024 Presidential election. We hear from EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin that climate change is a “religion”, not a science. We hear from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth – a gentleman unfamiliar with climate change signals, but very familiar with a different kind of Signal – that climate change is “crap”. And on April 8^th, 2025, we heard from the Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, the man who recently vowed that he would not dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that “nearly $4 million in funding is ending to Princeton University after a detailed, careful, and thorough review of the Department’s financial assistance programs against National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (“NOAA”) current program objectives.”

Secretary Lutnick’s decision is shocking. The language used to justify it sounds like something straight out of George Orwell’s 1984:

Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System I: This cooperative agreement promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as “climate anxiety,” which has increased significantly among America’s youth. Its focus on alarming climate scenarios fosters fear rather than rational, balanced discussion. Additionally, the use of federal funds to support these narratives, including educational initiatives aimed at K-12 students, is misaligned with the administration's priorities. NOAA will no longer fund these initiatives.

The impact of the proposed NOAA cuts will be severe. They will gut the climate modeling work of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab in Princeton (GFDL), one of the crown jewels in this nation’s scientific enterprise. With one flourish of his budgetary pen, Secretary Lutnick has set U.S. climate science back by decades.

Let me tell you a little bit about GFDL. They’ve been around as long as I have – since 1955. They are one of the world’s leaders in modeling Earth’s climate system, and in advancing understanding of the nature and causes of climate change. GFDL’s ranks, past and present, include some of the best and brightest minds in climate science. Folks like Suki Manabe, who won part of the 2021 Nobel Physics Prize for “…the physical modelling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming.” Isaac Held, who helped to unravel the inner workings of the atmospheric general circulation. “Ram” Ramaswamy, a top atmospheric chemist and the current GFDL Director. The list is long. And it includes many generations of students who cut their scientific teeth at GFDL, and then went on to stellar careers around the world.

NOAA and GFDL are powerful threads running through my scientific life. In the 1990s, inspired by the work of Suki Manabe, I collaborated with GFDL scientists to search for a fingerprint of the expected atmospheric temperature changes in response to human-caused CO₂ increases. Manabe’s predicted fingerprint was there in the data. We found it first in weather balloon temperature measurements made by GFDL’s Bram Oort, and later in satellite temperature measurements produced by NOAA’s Cheng-Zhi Zou.

The rich scientific legacy of GFDL cannot be destroyed or erased by Mr. Lutnick. But if his cuts are unopposed, he can destroy the scientific future of GFDL.

Which gets us back to the rewriting of history and reality. In the final analysis, the victor cannot rewrite reality. The victorious Trump, Lutnick, Hegseth, and Zeldin, along with all their enablers, may temporarily fool some U.S. citizens into thinking that climate change is an “exaggerated and implausible” threat cooked up by woke scientists. But the reality of climate change will ultimately be written in bold font by the physics of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. This reality is indifferent to the willful ignorance of our politicians.

Most forms of higher life obey the prime directive of protecting their young. It’s how they try to guarantee the survival of their genetic heritage. In the U.S. of 2025, our government no longer obeys this prime directive. Our leaders are destroying our fragile planetary life support system, imperiling the well-being of present and future generations. And our leaders are destroying institutions – like GFDL – that have alerted us to the existence of human-caused climate change. We cannot let this stand.

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Benjamin Santer is an atmospheric scientist who has worked on all previous Scientific Assessment Reports of the IPCC.