US Bails on Climate Science
My recent coverage:
Will the US Sabotage Global Climate Science? (Splinter News)
Aaron Cantú
Aaron Cantú
Aaron Cantú
I spoke with KALW about this story.
US Bails on Climate Science
How Trump kneecapped the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
On February 12, I published a story with Splinter News revealing some early moves the Trump administration had made to an office responsible for coordinating international collaboration to study climate change.
I reported that at least three top liaisons between the US Global Change Research Program and the White House's Office of Technology & Policy had been dismissed. All three had climate expertise:
Contractors who work for the USGCRP report to liaisons from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology (OSTP). According to a source with direct knowledge, only one Biden OSTP-USGCRP liaison, Heidi Roop, is still there. Three others — Mike Kuperberg from the Department of Energy, Stacy Aguilera-Peterson from the National Sciences Foundation, and Ariela Zycherman from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — are back at their home agencies.
In normal times, that wouldn’t necessarily be a big deal. New presidents come in and shape their OSTPs as they see fit. Trump brought in a new director of the OSTP — the same one he installed there during his first term, if somewhat unofficially — to replace Biden’s on Inauguration Day. But the Trump administration, following the instructions laid out in Project 2025 along with Trump’s own general ideological zeal against climate action, appears to have already begun purging climate workers and projects.
Notably, I reported, the USGCRP is responsible for organizing much of the work the US does as part of its responsibilities with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This UN-created body releases a major report every five to seven years summarizing the latest research on how human activities are warming the planet and altering the climate. Nearly all nations in the world participate. But the transition from Biden to Trump set the stage for an unusually disruptive change for the next IPCC report:
The last time the IPCC released a major report was from 2021 to 2023. The next one will be released toward the end of Trump’s second term ... Under Biden, according to sources who participated in the creation of the last IPCC report, US delegates successfully lobbied for a greater role in the new report due out in 2028/2029. The goal was to send a message that US climate leadership was back after a Trump hiatus.
The Chief Scientist at NASA, Katherine Calvin, is leading the IPCC working group focused on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions that are heating the atmosphere. The USGCRP is managing logistics for Calvin and other members of the US delegation at the IPCC and is also contracting out the actual production of the third part of the report to the NOAA Assessment Technical Support Unit, which is composed of a team at North Carolina State University.
The day after Splinter published my story, NASA issued a Termination Order for the USGCRP to end its IPCC Technical Support Unit, according to an official email sent to me from the USGCRP office. The USGCRP's Technical Support Unit, including the work contracted out to the NOAA Assessment Technical Support Unit, was contributing to the IPCC's Working Group III, which is specifically focusing on limiting greenhouse gas emissions and thereby mitigating the worst effects of climate change.
It's not clear if the Technical Support Unit was terminated because it focused on climate, or as part of a general cost cutting effort across the government, or both. The USGCRP didn't respond to my request for comment. I also have questions out to NASA, and an interview request out to NASA Chief Scientist Katherine Calvin, who was chairing Working Group III.
Outwardly, the IPCC hasn't commented about the US ending its work on the report. The end of the Technical Support Unit doesn't mean that the US has completely abandoned the IPCC. There are 18 Americans still recognized as experts and IPCC Bureau Members for the next assessment.
But several of my sources involved in the creation of the next assessment are worried that these moves by the US are undermining the world's eminent scientific and diplomatic process for communicating the risks and realities of climate change. Other nations will have to step in to do the work the US had agreed to do.
It's also disastrous for US leadership on studying climate change. Never has a country been so involved in the IPCC process only to abruptly abandon the effort. It's an even more jarring change considering how the US helped pioneer the study of Earth Sciences. From my Splinter article:
It’s difficult to overstate just how fundamental the federal shift toward explicit, proactive climate denial is in the recent history of Earth science. In the 1980s and 1990s, the US was at the forefront of bringing together scientists from across the world to build the very first models mimicking how the climate operates at a global scale. Data about the atmosphere, the oceans and more collected by nations in Europe, as well as countries like Japan and Argentina, helped us answer whether global climate changes were part of natural variability or a result of human activity. The USGCRP made much of this early coordination possible.
In the coming months I plan to follow this story and continue assessing the impacts the US's political descent on the climate crisis.