Fired Government Scientists Are Finding New Ways to Spread the Word on Climate Change

By Thor Benson

Thor Benson

In April of last year, Donald Trump’s administration halted work on a climate science report that the United States had been producing for over 20 years. The congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment (NCA) is meant to give Americans a clear view of how climate change is impacting the nation. The government fired hundreds of scientists and researchers who were working on the latest edition.

Now, many of these scientists have released the first of a series of reports meant to look at how climate research has progressed since the last NCA in 2023, and where climate research could go next. The report was published in two scientific journals at once, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society and Earth’s Future to reach a larger audience.

This effort is called the U.S. Climate Collection. The report isn’t a replacement for the NCA, but it does help contextualize what’s happened with climate research in recent years as Trump has called the climate crisis a “hoax” and undercut the government’s ability to combat it.

“It’s been a number of years since the last National Climate Assessment, and this effort is intended to think about what we know, what has advanced since then and what emerging priorities need to be addressed,” Melissa Kenney, a lead author of the report and the director of research at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, tells Rolling Stone. 

The report looks at how climate science has advanced since the last NCA and what topics need further research, including compounding hazards like heat waves overlapping with wildfire smoke. It also highlights the need to research how to improve weather forecasts, the indirect economic effects of climate change, and growing threats to agriculture.

“Human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are driving climate change and increasing the likelihood, frequency, and/or intensity of many types of extreme weather events and other climate hazards,” the report reads. “These changes are already harming people, economies, infrastructure, and ecosystems globally and across the United States.”

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Kenney says regular assessments and syntheses are important for the climate science community.

“Without regular assessments, we risk making today’s decisions using yesterday’s climate information,” Kenney says. “A single study provides one line of evidence, but when we’re looking at hundreds of thousands of studies in synthesis and assessment research, we’re trying to connect the dots so that scientists can see the bigger picture, but also so that the public can see the bigger picture.”

Informing the public has been a major focus of scientists around the country who have watched the Trump administration try to kneecap climate research efforts. After the Trump administration took down climate.gov, which had been intended to inform the public about climate science, last year, laid-off scientists who had worked on it revived it at a new web address. 

“The science community has a deep connection to, and responsibility to, the broader public to keep the public informed of risks, whether those risks are in climate, in health, in security or in AI,” says Costa Samaras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who worked on the new climate report. “The broader scientific research community is stepping in when the government is falling short.”

Since Trump took office, the science community has been facing consistent attacks on crucial research institutions. As The New York Times recently reported, the administration had the National Science Foundation withheld roughly $1.4 billion in research funding last year that was approved by Congress. Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency also fired scores of government scientists and eliminated over 1,600 research grants. 

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One of the other authors of the new climate report, a climate scientist at Rutgers University named Robert Kopp, wrote a piece for The New Republic in March about how scientists are “fighting back” against Trump administration efforts to hinder scientific progress and understanding. He described how the “climate research community has begun organizing to promote genuine science and preserve U.S. participation in the global climate science community.”

“Just because a threat is not articulated by the federal government doesn’t mean the threat’s going away,” Samaras says. “It just means folks don’t know about it, or don’t know as much about it. The field of climate science did not stop just because the administration is not proceeding with a National Climate Assessment on the same schedule.”

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