Immigrants are eating pets! Children are being given sex-change operations at school! Climate change is a scam! Disinformation has taken hold in the United States.

A deluge of propaganda — through social media, from Donald Trump and other Republican leaders, from foreign bad actors and by “imitation journalists” on cable TV — has blurred truth and buried facts. This has many Americans confused about climate change, including reporters and Supreme Court justices.

A journey back in time can help.

I’ve given over 100 public talks about climate change in the last 15 years, at times needing to engage audiences whose opinions have been hardened by Fox News and other sources (see Talking With Climate Skeptics and Climate Change Isn’t the Stock Exchange). Reviewing the history of climate science has proven to be a powerful antidote to disinformation and a way to open many people’s minds.

In the early days of the United States, a contemporary of Thomas Jefferson, the French physicist Joseph Fourier (1768-1830), was the first to postulate that the Earth’s atmosphere insulates the planet. Without this gaseous blanket, our planet would be cold and inhospitable. This is now a foundational principle of planetary physics known as the greenhouse effect.

Thirty years later, just before the U.S. Civil War, Eunice Foote and John Tyndall demonstrated in the laboratory that some components of air (i.e., water vapor and carbon dioxide) can absorb heat. Because Foote, as a woman, was not allowed to present her findings at scientific meetings, Tyndall’s work is more renowned. He concluded in 1859 that “the atmosphere admits the entrance of the solar heat, but checks its exit; and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.”

Tyndall, who was one of the first to ascend the Matterhorn, saw in the Alps clear evidence that the world’s glaciers used to be much larger. How so much ice could have accumulated on the planet was a question of scientific debate. Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius proposed an answer. He calculated that the temperature of the Earth would be significantly colder if there was half as much CO2 in the atmosphere, and this would cause the glaciers and ice sheets to grow.

But it was Arrhenius’ colleague, Arvid Hogbom, who realized that humans were actually engineering a different atmospheric transformation. He estimated that carbon-dioxide concentrations would gradually increase due to the burning of coal and oil. This inspired Arrhenius to run his calculations in reverse, estimating in 1896 that a doubling of carbon-dioxide concentrations would raise the Earth’s temperature by 5 – 6°C.

This is not that different than today’s estimate of 1.5 – 4.5°C (which benefits from a modern understanding of cloud physics). That Arrhenius could be so accurate, with just paper and pencil, demonstrates how fundamental the physical principles are that drive climate change.

At this point, I remind my audiences that this basic understanding of climate, the Theory of Global Warming, was established 20 years before the Theory of Continental Drift in 1912. No one today debates Continental Drift, so why mistrust another accepted theory — one established even earlier? There has been no doubt in the scientific community for decades, which is why the science advisors to every President since Lyndon Johnson have called attention to the global warming problem. It is also why the National Academies of Science, representing expertise from all the leading industrialized nations, issued an unprecedented statement calling for urgent action to reduce emissions and “avert damaging changes to Earth’s climate.” After my talks, people often tell me that learning the history of climate science helped them realize why there is such a resolute scientific consensus.

Unfortunately, this essential content hasn’t reached some reporters, nor the Supreme Court. The Court ruled (5-4) in 2007 (Massachusetts v. EPA) that the Clean Air Act provides the authority for the EPA to regulate carbon emissions as air pollution. But the Court mistakenly asserted that Congress did not understand the impact of carbon emissions on climate as the rationale for regulation. Instead — and without the requisite historical facts — the Court majority doubted that, in 1970, when the Clean Air Act was adopted, Congress was familiar with the impact of greenhouse gases on climate. The Court majority wrote that, at that time, “the study of climate change was in its infancy.”

Clearly, the Supreme Court needs to do its homework, because its rationale is missing a century of history. Science historian, Naomi Oreskes, said that she “nearly had a heart attack” when she read that line, because “it was just so incredibly wrong.” Her new paper documents that, at the highest levels, the U.S. government was concerned about greenhouse-gas emissions altering the climate long before the adoption of the Clean Air Act in 1970. She and other researchers discovered “more than 100 examples of Congressional hearings that examined CO2 and the greenhouse effect prior to the adoption of the Clean Air Act.” Indeed, President Nixon’s Air Pollution Task Force concluded that “the greatest consequences of air pollution for man’s continued life on earth are its effects on the earth’s climate.” This is why Edmund Muskie (D-ME), one of the lead authors of the Clean Air Act, warned when introducing the Act on the floor of the Senate that unchecked air pollution will “threaten irreversible atmospheric and climatic changes.”

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling in West Virginia v. EPA is just as confounding. The Court decided that the EPA had overstepped its authority by requiring emission reductions across multiple power plants because the agency lacked explicit authorization from Congress. This assertion refuses to acknowledge that Congress understood when the Clean Air Act was adopted that greenhouse-gas emissions would have to be controlled across the economy (and the world) to protect public health and safety. Oreskes hopes that what now has been revealed will “put the lie to the myth that has been propagated that the Clean Air Act had nothing to do with carbon dioxide.”

Justice Kagan dissented from the Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, stating: “Whatever else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change. And let’s say the obvious: The stakes here are high. Yet the Court today prevents congressionally authorized agency action to curb power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions. The Court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decision-maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”

Yet there is something more frightening: the future the Supreme Court bequeaths to us through its negligence. Just as scientists have predicted for decades, based on the Theory of Global Warming, we now see "one-in-1,000-year” rainstorms becoming frequent occurrences, hurricanes quickly intensifying, droughts getting deeper, sea level rising and heatwaves and wildfires becoming more intense. By creating legal barriers to government action, the Supreme Court is assuring future damage and destruction that could be avoided.

Years from now, the struggle to cope with the world’s rapidly changing climate is going to be much more difficult than it is today. Our descendants will look back at this time and wonder how the powerful could have been so irresponsibly ignorant of history.

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