The Autobiography of Kevin Trenberth

I didn't know that Kevin Trenberth, the long-time climate scientist at NOAA in Boulder, published an autobiography in 2023. It's titled A Personal Tale of the Development of Climate Science: The Life and Times of Kevin Trenberth. I can't find it for sale (maybe it wasn't published in book form), but here's an online version, and you can download a PDF there.

He retired in 2020 and in 2021 moved to New Zealand (his native country) with his wife. I haven't started to read his book fully yet, just jumped around. This is about his life after retirement, from page 128:

In 2018 I began a phased retirement that included a visit to New Zealand. Following the election of Donald Trump as President and denier-in-chief in 2017, my daughter Annika, with two young children, was ahead of most, and with strong support from her husband, Matt, took advantage of her New Zealand citizenship to plan to and then move her family to New Zealand in September 2018. This was a remarkable and courageous act. With my own retirement looming, there was a strong incentive for my wife and me to follow.

The foremost reason for leaving the U.S. was family, and the timing was determined by retirement. But Trump, the Republicans and U.S. society were also major factors. The latter included guns, school shootings, and the covid-19 response. The ineptitude of the U.S. in handling all of these is evident....

I'm seeing more and more people say or write that the US is no longer a country worth living in, it's a country worth escaping from. I even see video clips of younger Americans saying that. And clips from Americans who have moved abroad talk about how much better life is where they went, especially the escape from constant work, too little vacation, affordable health care, a gain of peace and the lack of constant political turmoil.

Trenberth never had a formal retirement gathering at NCAR. It was planned for March 16, 2021 but NCAR in Boulder closed on March 13, 2021 due to the pandemic. On March 22, 2001 there was a mass shooting in a grocery store in Boulder, with 10 killed. Surely that only reinforced their decision to leave. And of course the massacre that started this era of mass shootings happened just down the road in Columbine in 1999.

America's decline into dystopia might well have started with Columbine in 1999, 9/11 in 2021, and Bush Jr's lies that started the first Iraq War. The trend has been downward since, and with Trump II the chaos is just getting started and will undoubtably be worse than Trump I. Last month a majority of Americans voted to move up to the 20th floor, because the 10th floor apparently wasn't high enough for a decent suicide. It's very likely the elevator only goes in one direction.