Fukushima.

Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. Unseen lethal poisons in the air. Abandoned cities. Stealth terror is attached to the place names of famous nuclear disasters. Yet the first and worst nuclear power disaster on American soil occurred over fifty years ago, just outside Los Angeles, and the meltdown remains all but unknown today.

The date was July 12, 1959. A company called Atomics International, testing the operation of a reactor utilizing the technology that destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, lost control of an experiment at its Santa Susana Field Laboratory just north of L.A.

For two weeks, the lab spewed a cocktail of radioactive debris into the Southern California air, including deadly plutonium and strontium. How much? No one seems to know. Where did it go? Ask the winds — there apparently are no records. Residents of nearby Simi Valley these many years later still seek answers. And the half — million suburbanites who live within ten miles of the site? They remain at risk because thorough cleanup of the poisoned landscape has been stalled and, according to Physicians for Social Responsibility, “Contamination continues to migrate… and has been found in numerous offsite locations.”

“Mark Twain is famous for saying, ‘Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.’”

Here’s the scariest part: Santa Susana — type nightmares can be replicated whenever and wherever science is ignored and stifled. And, I’m sad to report, the Trump era is ushering in an open season on science.

Our oceans are becoming hot tubs. Tropical sea turtles wander north in the warming Pacific, far from their usual Southern California and Mexican haunts before they encounter cold water, turn south, and try to return to home waters. Rescuers find lost olive ridleys beached, malnourished, comatose, and suffering from hyperthermia on beaches not far from my University of Oregon office in Eugene. This is just one example of nature’s growing screams that global warming is changing our world for the worse, as we continue to pollute the air with carbon dioxide and methane. Another prime example? The fast — melting polar ice caps.

Some among us, including President Trump, don’t like hearing this type of bad news. Responsible reaction costs big money and stifles business as usual. “Scary science talk” about things like melting polar ice caps calls out us humans for our ignorance and failing stewardship of the natural world. This is why Trump and his legions of supporters reject the solid evidence that we the people, with our automobiles and our polluting industries, are killing the planet. The naysayers prefer so — called “alternative facts” and conspiracies that support the administration’s proposed cuts to regulations that protect our environment.

Following Mr. Trump’s move into the White House, he sent a cadre of anti — science climate change deniers to take over crucial government agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency. Their assignment: negate established science and question the credibility of experts. The scientists whose work was targeted are the same federal researchers the public has been looking to for help as we struggle with the immediate effects of climate change, like rising sea levels and extreme weather.

Mark Twain is famous for saying, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” In truth, important work is being done around the world to deal with the changing weather, but it’s work the Trump administration wants to stop. To quote our Twitter — loving president, “Sad!”

How about a quick history lesson, just for fun? First, a pop quiz. How bad a president was Richard Nixon? Nixon was in office when maybe your grandfather voted against him — or for him. But he left the White House disgraced after the Watergate scandal, the first and only president in our history to resign. (So far!) Weirdly enough, Tricky Dick Nixon, a couple of generations before Twitter was invented, talked in tweets. Two of his most famous lines are: “I am not a crook!” and “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore!”

But there’s more. Before Nixon’s exile from Washington back to California, the Republican president signed the executive order establishing the Environmental Protection Agency. Whether he gave a hoot about the environment or was merely trying to distract attention from his escalating Vietnam War, who knows? But half a century later, the EPA has managed to orchestrate the cleanup of some ungodly man — made messes. And it’s done a bang — up job of raising our national consciousness about the dangers of pollution to our health and to our children’s future.

Remember that Mad Men scene, staged in the early sixties, when Don Draper takes his family on a picnic? They’ve finished eating and are ready to head back to their gas — guzzling Cadillac. Draper drains his beer and then hurls the empty can across the grass, no trash can in sight. His wife shakes out their blanket, flinging paper plates and dirty napkins to the wind. Littering in those pre — EPA days was routine, just as poisonous industrial waste spewing into our air and water was considered an acceptable cost of doing business.

“How lucky some of us are to live insulated from the ravages of ruined environments that the EPA struggles to clean up.”

How easy it is to forget our dirty recent past. How lucky some of us are to live insulated from the ravages of ruined environments that the EPA struggles to clean up. Enter Team Trump.

The president was on the job less than a month when his new EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, reiterated on CNBC his beliefs regarding climate change science: “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”

In his former role as Attorney General of Oklahoma, Pruitt sued the EPA repeatedly. His beef? The agency attempts to control air pollution in his oil — producing, gas — refining state. No surprise then that the fossil fuel business donated luxuriously to his election campaigns. And no surprise that when President Trump revealed his first budget to Congress, the EPA was gutted, its proposed funding slashed by a third.

Senator Bernie Sanders responded to Trump’s choice of Pruitt on Twitter: “Trump’s nominee to lead EPA, Scott Pruitt, is a climate denier who’s worked closely with the fossil fuel industry. That’s sad and dangerous.” Meanwhile, the growing public cacophony against scientists who link human activity to global warming is only getting louder.

This assault on the EPA and climate science is nothing new for Pruitt and his fellow climate change deniers. The EPA Administrator’s pal, Oklahoma senator James Inhofe, as chairman of the environment committee, took to the Senate floor years ago to declare catastrophic global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” No coincidence that the Sooner State’s senior senator is author of the book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.

On the House side of the Capitol, Texas representative Joe Barton, as senior Republican on the energy committee, invoked his Supreme Being when speaking of climate change. “For us to try to step in and say we have got to do all these global things to prevent the Earth from getting any warmer is absolute nonsense,” was his response to scientists forecasting global calamity. Then his money line: “You can’t regulate God.”

“I don’t believe climate change is real,” says Fox talk — show host and Trump sycophant Sean Hannity, who’s been preaching this to his legions of TV watchers and radio listeners for years. “I think this is global warming hysteria and alarmism.”

There’s nothing new under the sun, so to speak, when it comes to the denial and name — calling that climate change scientists and their critics are mired in these days. As far back as the 1890s, Swedish physicist and chemist Svante Arrhenius speculated that man — made carbon dioxide was adding to the natural greenhouse effect and making the Earth hotter. “Nonsense,” was the response of his naysaying contemporaries.

Fast — forward to today, to the coalition of scientists working with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These experts are convinced the Earth’s temperature will continue to rise unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, and that the consequences otherwise will be disastrous. “Nonsense” is again the response from naysayers.

One of the loudest of these naysayers is James Delingpole, the British journalist who now writes for the ultraconservative Breitbart News (home of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon before he joined Team Trump). Delingpole is the hack who takes credit for popularizing the term “Climategate,” in regards to the emails leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU).

You might remember this phony scandal: Late in 2009, hundreds of private email messages between CRU scientists were stolen and made public. Delingpole and other critics of climate science seized on the documents as examples of a conspiracy. News of the leak broke just before a UN climate summit in Copenhagen; in other words, it was timed to embarrass scientists, politicians, and activists calling for international policies to reduce human — caused climate change.

“[The emails] show quite clearly that the scientists at the CRU were trying to skew the data to a particular end,” Delingpole told me. He points to one in particular that refers to “Mike’s trick… to hide the decline” of recorded temperatures. The email is from Phil Jones, CRU director at the time, and the “Mike” he refers to is Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology and director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.

Mann is famous for developing the so — called hockey — stick graph, the diagram that illustrates the sudden increase in global temperatures we’re now experiencing. Delingpole insists that Jones, Mann, and other scientists who’ve come to catastrophic conclusions about global warming manipulate data to support their theories in order to generate research funding and build their professional reputations.

Dr. Mann dismisses such charges as desperate attempts by climate change skeptics and deniers to “cherry pick” fragments of informal chatter among colleagues in an effort to debunk established scientific conclusions. “It’s very easy to take thousands of personal emails, private correspondences between scientists, and mine them, as the attackers have, for individual words or phrases that can be taken out of context,” Mann told me not long after his correspondence was stolen.

“Meanwhile, polar ice collapses and raging wildfires destroy forests as heat records are broken year after year.”

He explains his “trick” and its goal to “hide the decline” as standard operating procedure. “Scientists and mathematicians use the term ‘trick’ to refer to a convenient or clever way of solving a problem,” he said. “To imply otherwise is to misrepresent what was being said, to take advantage of a term that means something different in scientific lingo from what it might seem to those not familiar with that lingo.”

For his part, Phil Jones, author of that damaging “hide the decline” email, admits poor judgment, but not flawed science. “Some of the emails probably had poorly chosen words and were sent in the heat of the moment, when I was frustrated,” Dr. Jones said as his critics called for his resignation. “I would never manipulate the data one bit.”

Enter Dr. Tim Ball, a retired University of Winnipeg climatology professor and prolific anthropogenic (human — caused) global warming theory denier. He claims that carbon dioxide is not the problem. “It’s not causing climate change,” he told me. “It never did. It never will.” Not that he denies climate change. “It’s always gone on and it always will go on.” But he discounts human behavior as a significant contributing factor. In the leaked CRU emails, however, he sees malicious intent. “Unless you know the science, you could look at some of those emails as relatively innocent.” He rejects Mann’s assertion that the emails have been cherry — picked for out — of — context statements. “The criminality is so obvious in deliberately leaving out data, in deliberately adding in data to achieve the result you want.”

But contrarians like Dr. Ball are without credibility from Mann’s point of view, because they critique his work without performing their own. “If he really believed the basic science behind climate change was fundamentally flawed, that climate change is some massive hoax,” Mann said, “then he and his colleagues would be publishing evidence to support those claims in the mainstream scientific literature. If what they’re saying is true, it would be so profound that it would certainly merit publication in the leading journals of the world.”

Nonetheless, Ball is not alone in making what are essentially baseless repudiations, and several high — profile popular figures with no climatology training continue to question the conclusions of established experts like Mann. And because of their celebrity status, the deniers’ opinions are publicized and they gain followers.

John Mackey, cofounder and CEO of Whole Foods, weighed in on the debate by insisting that “no scientific consensus exists” regarding anthropogenic global warming, and worries that “hysteria about global warming” will result in increased regulations and taxes. Mackey points to Heaven and Earth, a book written by Australian mining professor Ian Plimer, as his global warming primer. “If there are indeed human — induced climate changes,” writes Plimer, a geologist with no climate science experience, “then we are unable to separate them from natural variability.” Plimer, like Mackey, fears government reactions to global warming predictions will result in policy changes that inhibit freedom and dilute individual wealth.

The late Michael Crichton was another global warming denier. His novel State of Fear (heartily endorsed by Oklahoma senator Inhofe) is a typical fast — paced Crichton thriller, but carries an “Author’s Message” at the back of the book: “Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be man — made.” Former president George W. Bush embraced the novel and invited the author to the White House for a chat about their shared opinions on climate change. Crichton faulted funding mechanisms that he insisted — without convincing evidence — create incentives for manipulating scientific studies. “Scientists know that continued funding depends on delivering the results the funders desire,” he wrote.

Michael Mann charges that Winnipeg’s Tim Ball is a prime example of such corruption, beholden to the polluting energy companies. “I see him acting as a paid advocate of the fossil fuel industry,” Mann says.

“That’s an absolute falsehood,” claims Ball. “I have never received a nickel from any energy company. That’s part of the smear campaign.” Ball points back to Mann and other scientists receiving government grants, who, he says, get such funding because they generate conclusions that support government policy goals.

Another anthropogenic global warming skeptic is Eduardo Zorita, a climate scientist at the GKSS Research Center in Germany. After the email debacle at CRU, Zorita called on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to preclude Mann and Jones from further involvement in IPCC climate study work. “They tried to block studies from groups that did not agree with them,” says Dr. Zorita, “and one of those groups was our[s].” He charges the scientists with pushing their own agenda, with a lack of objectivity, and with a prejudice against studies that contradicted their own conclusions about climate — and he says that the intercepted email traffic proves his claims.

Dr. Mann claims Zorita’s charges are really just sour grapes. “When something like [the email leak] happens there is inevitably those who are going to try to exploit this to settle a score,” Mann said. “He attacked our work in an article in Science some years ago and we showed his attacks were incorrect.”

But Zorita insists that Mann and his colleagues conspired to keep Zorita’s work out of prestigious academic publications. “This is very clear from the emails,” he said. “Mann tried to influence [peer] reviewers and this is, in science, very, very unethical behavior. Climate science has been politicized, so everything one says can be used or misused.” According to Zorita, Mann tried to marginalize his work because Zorita criticized his hockey — stick graph.

The charges and countercharges are relentless, juvenile even, and they seethe with rancor. Meanwhile, polar ice collapses and raging wildfires destroy forests as heat records are broken year after year.

“Scientists themselves are not great communicators,” Aaron Huertas, former spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said to me after Climategate broke, pointing out that many contrarians do not have a science background. “Because they’re not scientists and don’t know the evidence on an intimate level, they can spout off and say things that sound good even though they’re not true. Actual climate scientists don’t like stating things in flat certain terms. They want to tell you how the evidence is weighed one way or the other. It’s hard for people to understand. It’s much easier to understand an articulate person who is willing to make stuff up and play fast and loose with the facts. That person can sound much more appealing than your average scientist.”

Continued Huertas: “Six percent of the American public does believe the moon landing was faked. If you check the websites of the people who believe that, they’re doing the same thing with climate science. These contrarians are really dangerous. It’s just as dangerous as the tobacco company folks who were out there saying smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer. We can’t make informed decisions in a democracy without good information. A lot of the information about climate change that these guys are putting out is bad.”

Which brings us back to Breitbart writer James Delingpole. “Yuck,” Mann said when I brought up his name. “Delingpole and Christopher Booker [another British journalist who calls climate change “the worst scientific scandal of our generation”] are so far off in the wacky extreme that nobody believes them except the readers of their wacky columns. At least I’d like to believe that to be true. Serious people are mostly disregarding their rantings.”

Mann characterizes Delingpole’s attacks as ugly and dangerous, rabble — rousing that is appealing to a public that too often fails to study important issues and simply listens to compelling arguments. “The very same people that we saw on television during town hall meetings shouting down politicians,” Mann said, “are the people the contrarian climate change movement is now turning on us. They are exploiting that unreason and discontent and turning it on the climate science community. To me, that is what is so chilling and scary.”

“Scientist Mann and writer Delingpole do agree that circumstances are dire, albeit for very different reasons.”

“For me,” said Delingpole, “this is by far the most important story of our lifetime. There has never been an occasion in history where governments have been united to create this system whereby the public is fleeced through green taxes and green regulations. The actions being taken in the name of combating global warming are threatening the world with economic disaster.”

“Fox, meet henhouse,” Dr. Mann wrote in a Washington Post op — ed last December, when Scott Pruitt was picked to lead the EPA. He expresses worry that “four (possibly eight) years of denial and delay might commit the planet to not just feet, but yards, of sea level rise, massive coastal flooding (made worse by more frequent Katrina and Sandy — like storms), historic deluges, and summer after summer of devastating heat and drought across the country.”

President Trump could try to tweet his way out of the nightmare of climate change. But he wouldn’t succeed. And if he is incapable of reversing his opposition to established science, he runs the risk of being most remembered not for making America great again, but for following Mark Twain’s dictum and not doing anything about the weather.

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