WASHINGTON — Two major scientific societies on Friday said they will fill the void from the Trump administration’s dismissal of scientists writing a cornerstone federal report on what climate change is doing to the United States.
The American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union said they will work together to produce peer-reviewed research documents assessing the current and future national impacts of climate change because a science-based report required by law is suddenly in question and being reassessed by President Donald Trump’s White House.
Earlier this week, Trump’s Republican administration told about 400 scientists working on the National Climate Assessment that they were no longer needed and that the report was being reevaluated. That report, coming once every four to five years, is required by a 1990 federal law and was due out around 2027. Preliminary budget documents show slashing funding or eliminating offices involved in coordinating that report, scientists and activists said.
“We are filling in a gap in the scientific process,” AGU President Brandon Jones said. “It’s more about ensuring that science continues.”
Meteorological society past president Anjuli Bamzi, a retired federal atmospheric scientist who has worked on previous National Climate Assessments, said one of the most important parts of the federal report is that it projects 25 and 100 years into the future.
With the assessment “we’re better equipped to deal with the future,” Bamzi said. “We can’t be an ostrich and put our head in the sand and let it go.”
Texas Tech University climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, also chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy, said the two organizations joining to do this report “is a testament to how important it is that the latest science be summarized and available.”
Hayhoe, who was a lead author of reports in 2009, 2018 and 2023, said “people are not aware of how climate change is impacting the decisions that they are making today, whether it’s the size of the storm sewer pipes they’re installing, whether it is the expansion of the flood zone where people are building, whether it is the increases in extreme heat.”
They need that knowledge to figure out how to adapt to harms in the future and even the present, Hayhoe said.
The national assessment, unlike global United Nations documents, highlights what’s happening to weather not just in the nation but at regional and local levels.
Jones said he hopes the societies’ version of the assessment can be done in just one year.
The last climate assessment report, released in 2023, said that climate change is ”harming physical, mental, spiritual, and community health and well-being through the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events, increasing cases of infectious and vector-borne diseases, and declines in food and water quality and security.”
In 2018, during Trump’s first term, the assessment was just as blunt, saying: “Climate change creates new risks and exacerbates existing vulnerabilities in communities across the United States, presenting growing challenges to human health and safety, quality of life, and the rate of economic growth.”
But University of Illinois climate scientist Donald Wuebbles, who led one of 2018’s two national reports, said he worries about what kind of document this new administration will try to issue, if any.
“I think they’ll put out something that will, like, it’ll be be scientifically based, but it will be pretty crappy,” Wuebbles told The Associated Press.
Watering down or killing the national assessment will not keep the message about the importance of climate change from getting out, Wuebbles said. The scientific societies’ efforts to fill the void will have some value because it will be a statement of the scientific community, and, in the end, he said, science is about data and observations.
“We know this is an extremely important problem. We know it is human activities driving it. So the question is: What do you do about it?” Wuebbles said.
Storms and wildfires don’t care if it’s a red state or a blue state, Hayhoe said.
“Climate change affects us all,” Hayhoe said. “It doesn’t matter how we vote.”
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