COLLEGE PARK, MARYLAND—Last week, at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) facility here, more than 100 climate scientists, many of them federal employees, gathered for a forum on tracking and reporting greenhouse gases. The mood was undeniably anxious. President Joe Biden’s administration had elevated their work, creating the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center last year as part of a new national strategy. But would that put them in the crosshairs of the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump?
Stephen Volz, NOAA’s assistant administrator for satellite and information services, addressed the tension in the room. “We’re looking at a change in administration and with that a change in emphasis,” he said. “There’s no way of getting around that.” But researchers needed to stay true to the science, and to the people who rely on it, he said. “The applications and uses of the data we collect [are] incontrovertible—despite what we might hear elsewhere.”
Trump’s attitude toward climate science—he has recently said climate change and its impacts are “one of the greatest scams of all time”—strikes fear in the hearts of the thousands of federal climate researchers. They wonder whether the incoming administration will simply force them to adopt a lower profile, or whether it will slash their ranks and funding—and whether legal safeguards will help. “This is a very scary time for many scientists,” says Jane Lubchenco, a former NOAA administrator and deputy director of climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Climate scientists are now embedded at nearly every U.S. agency, including the Department of Defense (DOD). At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, they help devise regulations of greenhouse gases from power plants and cars; at the Department of Agriculture they advise farmers on how to adapt their crops to warming; and at the Department of the Interior (DOI), they plan for worsening floods and the changing ranges of endangered species.
The U.S. government is also one of the world’s largest supporters of basic climate science. NASA launches satellites that monitor melting polar ice sheets as well as concentrations of carbon dioxide; NOAA deploys buoys that monitor rising ocean heat; and the Department of Energy runs advanced climate models on supercomputers.
Members of the incoming Trump administration have vowed to squash climate science and fire federal scientists they deem adversaries. Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee to lead the powerful White House Office of Management and Budget, authored a chapter of Project 2025, a conservative policy plan developed by the Heritage Foundation. It states that “the Biden administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.” Elsewhere, Project 2025 promises to purge climate science from DOD operations and proposes drastic cuts to climate research at NOAA.
The first Trump administration gave a preview. At EPA, it sought to weaken proposed limits on carbon dioxide emissions, ignoring the advice of its own scientists. At DOI, Secretary Ryan Zinke hired a friend from his time playing high school football to vet science grants, and recruiting of climate scientists slowed to a crawl, says Joel Clement, director of climate action at the Lemelson Foundation. Clement left DOI in 2017 after he was removed from his role helping Native Alaskan communities adapt to warming. At the U.S. Geological Survey, meanwhile, the director, former astronaut James Reilly, shut down efforts to project long-term climate change, limiting the use of model forecasts to only a few decades.
Much of the interference at these agencies was cosmetic, however. Mentions of global warming were scrubbed from press releases, for example. The agencies that fund or do climate science were mostly left alone to continue their work.
But that wasn’t for lack of trying, says Craig McLean, who led NOAA research at the time. Political operatives pushed McLean to focus on discredited lines of research favored by climate contrarians. McLean says he told the operatives that the law—in this case, NOAA’s congressional authorization—told him to use the best available science. Accepting their demand would be breaking the law. “The lesson for me was, I can stand between an assault on the science and the law,” he says. “And so can other officials.” Nearly every agency has a similar directive written into its authorization language, he notes.
Most vulnerable to politics, Clement says, will be organizations at the White House level with limited civil servant leadership, such as the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which coordinates interagency climate science and produces the National Climate Assessment. Efforts by the Trump administration to bury the assessment last time backfired spectacularly, drawing extensive media coverage. But in late 2020, the Trump administration did install climate contrarians to briefly lead the global change program and serve as NOAA’s chief scientist.
Much will also come down to the agency heads Trump installs. Trump’s first NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, a Republican congressman who once was labeled a climate denier, refashioned himself as an all-around supporter of science, including recognizing mainstream climate science. He struck a deal that allowed NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen to choose what research to publicize. “He tried hard to support science as best he could,” says Zurbuchen, who now serves as director of ETH Zürich Space. “He gave it the limelight.” Trump’s new nominee for NASA administrator is Jared Isaacman, a financial payments CEO and commercial astronaut who has said little about climate, although has stated his broad support for science.
This time around efforts to interfere with science may be more likely to run afoul of the courts, says Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. The Biden administration has strengthened many agencies’ scientific integrity policies, which prevent interference in science activities, such as reviewing grants. The policies have been clarified to state that they apply to political appointees and not just civil servants. If Trump officials want to rewrite them, they will have to go through a regulatory process, which means these changes can be challenged in court. And with the Supreme Court’s decision in the Chevron case, which overturned decades of deference to agency judgment, courts may decide that any policy changes are groundless. “There will be a number of judges who are not sympathetic to these efforts,” she says.
At the Greenhouse Gas Center meeting, one NASA researcher was “cautiously optimistic” that the center’s work could quietly continue, noting the widespread appetite for it. In its short existence, the center has already helped groups use an instrument on the International Space Station to track methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. And it has spurred EPA to make its greenhouse gas inventories more accessible to outside researchers. With more private companies moving into climate work, including launching their own greenhouse gas monitoring satellites, the demand for this information will only grow, the researcher noted. “We’re at a different place in who uses our data than 8 years ago.”
Still, Kurtz expects the next few years to be rough for climate scientists. “It’s going to be chaotic; it’s going to be unpredictable.” McLean suggests civil servants take the time to reflect on the lines they will not cross. “You’ve got to be prepared to walk away,” he says. “But if you’re going to walk away, you have to stand on top of a soapbox and broadcast what happened.”
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-climate-scientists-gird-second-trump-administration
