Spending cuts and directives questioning the reality and urgency of climate change have marked quick shifts in U.S. science policy.
Coffee, chocolate, peaches: climate change is affecting them all
New tools and technologies hold incredible promise when it comes to not just slowing down climate change but actually fighting it.
When local and state officials want to know how more intense rainfall or rising sea levels affects their communities, they can turn to the National Climate Assessment, a Congressionally mandated, scientific review published every few years.
Now its future is in question, as the Trump administration pursues its pledge to prioritize American energy independence and scale back the federal government’s plans to understand and prevent climate change. A canceled contract, spending cuts and directives questioning the reality and urgency of climate change threw the climate assessment effort into disarray during the week of April 7.
Authors for the next assessment had been selected, trainings coordinated by the U.S. Global Change Research Program were taking place and a separate advisory committee of experts was meeting. Then full stop.
NASA ended its contract with the ICF International consulting firm to provide staff support. An author training session was canceled with no explanation. The volunteer committee was fired, and a banner posted on the research program’s website now states its operations and structure are “under review.”
Meanwhile, the Department of Commerce announced a $4 million cut in contract agreements with Princeton University for a long-standing partnership at one of the world’s leading atmospheric science laboratories. A news release cited the promotion of “exaggerated and implausible climate threats” and efforts to “streamline and reduce the cost and size of the federal government.”
The cuts were for three grants to the university that are “no longer in keeping with the Trump Administration’s priorities,” stated the announcement from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Scientists at universities, laboratories and research programs across the country have alternately expressed horror and outrage at what they see as an anti-science agenda from the new administration, including the defense department.
“It is pure villainy. A crime against the planet—arguably, the most profound of all crimes,” said Michael Mann, a climatologist, author and professor who directs the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania.
Energy independence
President Donald Trump also signed an executive order directing the Attorney General to identify state and local laws that address “climate change” and “greenhouse gas emissions” among other terms. He directed that such laws be scrutinized to determine if they may be unconstitutional, preempted by Federal law or otherwise unenforceable to protect “American energy from state overreach.”
Such laws threaten “American energy dominance,” Trump’s order stated. “State laws and policies weaken our national security and devastate Americans by driving up energy costs for families coast-to-coast, despite some of these families not living or voting in States with these crippling policies.”
“American energy dominance is threatened when state and local governments seek to regulate energy beyond their constitutional or statutory authority,” it stated.
The steps to scale back climate research are the latest in a series of actions the administration has used to disparage decades of climate science and atmospheric research under both Republican and Democrat presidencies. The Global Change Research Program to conduct the climate assessments was established by Congress after action taken by President George H.W. Bush, who had been in the oil industry.
The actions, orders and statements from the federal departments closely follow the points and tone of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025.” The document referred to climate change roughly 50 times. It stated some of the programs at NOAA, including atmospheric research, form “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
Scientists react
Lutnick’s announcement “clearly expressed” agitated hostility toward climate change research, said Craig McLean, who retired as the assistant administrator of NOAA for research in 2021, and previously served as acting chief scientist and former director of the Office of Atmospheric Research.
“What Lutnick seems to be doing is taking steps to asphyxiate NOAA’s climate enterprise. This administration is neanderthal and taking us back to even before the 1950s,” McLean said. “If you don’t like your cancer diagnosis, just fire your doctor, I’m sure everything will be OK.”
McLean and many others fear the administration’s actions could hurt atmospheric and climate research not only in this country but around the world, since the U.S. has long been an international leader in the work.
“This can only be understood in terms of an administration that is run by the fossil fuel industry, collaborating with petrostates like Russia and Saudi Arabia, to compromise scientific research that threatens their agenda,” Mann told USA TODAY.
Decades of science
The Trump administration’s actions follow a year that U.S. and international organizations concluded was the hottest on record. So far this year more than 1,000 monthly warm temperature records have been set across the nation.
An overwhelming majority of international scientists say harmful emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide contribute to warming by increasing the natural levels of CO2 and upsetting the natural balance of greenhouse gases, including water vapor, that maintain Earth’s atmosphere.
Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency signaled it wanted to reconsider a 2009 finding that established a list of the harmful gases in response to a Supreme Court ruling during the George W. Bush administration.
NOAA and many scientists around the globe have stated – based on decades of scientific observation – that precipitation patterns are changing with rainfall arriving in more intense bursts with longer droughts in between. Scientific data collection around the world has demonstrated how temperatures are rising.
Even the company where Lutnick was previously CEO and chairman, Cantor Fitzgerald, states in documents that climate change is “the defining issue of our time” and one of the “greatest challenges of our time,” McLean noted.
“Scientific evidence indicates that if left unchecked, climate change will be disastrous and life threatening,” states one Cantor Fitzgerald document. The passage continued: “Climate change is a concern for a proportion of our clients, some of whom have been divesting from fossil fuels assets as early as 2017.
Princeton programs
The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory is a collaborative atmospheric and ocean sciences program with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at Princeton. The work of research scientists and graduate students is supported in part by federal funding. Roughly 175 scientists work at the laboratory, according to its website, more than a third with Princeton.
Among the targeted is a collaboration known as CIMES, the Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System. The announcement stated the program “promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as “climate anxiety,” which has increased significantly among America’s youth.”
Cutting funding would be a blow to a program widely considered to be the international leader, said McClean. “GFDL is remarkable.”
The dynamics laboratory also suffered an earlier blow when some probationary employees were fired during one of the early waves of the administration’s efforts to slash the federal budget. The agency also is undergoing a reduction in force.
The other two Princeton agreements targeted by the cuts focus on modeling atmospheric and ocean processes. The announcement referred to the laboratory’s widely accepted work on rainfall and ocean risks as “alleged changes to precipitation patterns and sea-level rise.”
In a statement to USA TODAY, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, said “Princeton University is one of the world’s preeminent institutions of higher education — pushing the boundaries of scholarship and research in our ever-evolving world.”
“The cost of the federal government defunding climate research is too high, especially for a state like ours on the front lines of climate change,” said Murphy, a Democrat.
As for the next National Climate Assessment, NASA said it is streamlining its support for the research program, which it manages on behalf of 15 agencies and working with the Office of Science and Technology Policy on “how to best support the congressionally-mandated program.” The scope of the contract for the National Academies also is under review.
Robert Socolow, a scientist, theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at Princeton, was serving on the now disbanded committee of experts from the academies who were advising the Global Change Research Program. They learned in an email that their previous meeting was their last, he said. They spent the next 24 hours calling and messaging each other to say their goodbyes.
Socolow began to see growing anxiety over climate change shortly after arriving at Princeton in the early 1970s. Much more work, rather than less, is needed to fully understand how humans are altering the climate and whether the cascading challenges can be addressed, he said.
If the nation doesn’t take action to learn as much about climate change as possible and whether it can be addressed in much the same way as the ozone hole and harmful emissions from shipping traffic, Socolow said, young people are far more likely to experience much greater anxiety than any they feel right now.