'Everyone's demoralized.' Trump's climate threats rattle world's biggest science meeting

Source: Politico

12/13/2024 11:47 AM EST


Censorship. Funding cuts. Layoffs. Those concerns loom over the world’s largest conference of climate scientists as they brace for whiplash at the White House when President-elect Donald Trump takes office in six weeks. Trump has recently said climate change isn’t happening, called it a hoax and joked that rising seas would create more coastal real estate — all in contradiction to the work of the 25,000 researchers attending the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in downtown Washington this week.

“Everybody at AGU is nervous,” Jill Brandenberger, climate security program manager at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said in an interview. “The unknown is what makes people nervous.”

Dozens of scientists who spoke with POLITICO and at the conference expressed worry that the second Trump administration could be more antagonistic toward research underpinning federal rules on climate and environmental health. Scientists across the government — from NOAA and NASA to the Energy Department’s network of national laboratories — may soon face political risks that undermine their work, hide their research or leave them unemployed, said people attending the conference.

Some scientists like Brandenberger say they’re confident that government research would survive in some form — much as it did during Trump’s first term, when many federal websites erased references to climate change, even as agency work largely plodded on. Yet they’re girding for changes. They expect priorities to shift from the Biden administration, which placed an emphasis on climate change and improving public health through rules to curb pollution from fossil fuels.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/13/trump-climate-threats-scientists-00194253