The gutting of US-funded climate science would cripple research agendas worldwide and hamper the global fight against climate change, say scientists outside the United States, some of whom will take to the streets today to make that point.
US President Donald Trump has called for drastic cutbacks across multiple federal agencies that track and analyse climate by gathering data from satellites, the deepest ocean trenches, and everything in between.
Tens of thousands of scientists are set to converge on Washington, DC in protest, with hundreds of smaller marches planned in cities around the world.
“An unprecedented attack on science, scientists and evidence-based policymaking is underway,” said Kenneth Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based policy institute.
“And nowhere is the attack more ferocious than on the issue of global warming.”
Indeed, proposed cuts to research budgets in the Departments of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, Nasa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - totalling billions of dollars and thousands of jobs - are concentrated on climate science, which Trump has notoriously dismissed as a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese.
Scientists in Europe, Asia and Australia express alarm not just at the slowdown in US research, but the knock-on consequences for their own work.
“The impacts may range from troublesome to disastrous,” Bjorn Samset, research director at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, said.
“We use US climate-related data - particularly from satellites - on a daily basis.”
The United States, driven by its big federal agencies, “has become THE global provider of high quality, long-term datasets,” he added.
Some of the programmes targeted for axing, for example, are crucial for tracking how much carbon is vented into the atmosphere, or how the distribution of clouds - one of the key uncertainties in projections of future climate change - might evolve over time.
“This would impair our ability in the future to keep our observations, and understanding, up to speed,” said Joeri Rogelj, a research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, one of the world’s leading centres for climate modelling.
For Myles Allen, head of the University of Oxford’s Climate Research Group, the damage from a US pullback would go well beyond raw data.
“If we lose that intellectual firepower, it is obviously going to make dealing with the problem that much harder,” he said in an interview. “We need American technology and innovation to find solutions.”
Three of six major international platforms shared by climate modellers - who calculate the risks of future climate change - are maintained and operated in the United States, and could be in peril.
“If we lose one or two of these data distribution centres in the US, it could collapse the entire co-ordinated system for sharing these simulations of future climate,” said Valerie Masson Delmotte, research director at France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, and a lead scientist of the UN’s climate science panel.
Today’s marches will show that scientists can no longer afford to stand at the sidelines.
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