Washington – Two main scientific societies said on Friday that they will fill the emptiness of the dismissal of Trump administration scientists who write a federal cornerstone report on what Climate change He is doing to the United States.
The American weather society and the American geophysical union said they will work together to produce research documents reviewed by peers that evaluate the current and future national impacts of climate change because a report based on the science required by law is suddenly in question and reevaluated by the White House of President Donald Trump.
Earlier this week, Trump’s republican administration told about 400 scientists who work in the national climatic evaluation that they were no longer necessary and that the report was being reassess. That report, which arrived once every four or five years, is required by a federal law of 1990 and left around 2027. Preliminary budgetary documents show cut funds or eliminating the offices involved in the coordination of that report, scientists and activists said.
“We are filling a vacuum in the scientific process,” said the president of AGU, Brandon Jones. “It’s more about ensuring that science continues.”
The former president of the Anjuli Bamzi Meteorological Society, a retired federal atmospheric scientist who has worked on previous national climatic evaluations, said one of the most important parts of the federal report is that 25 and 100 years is projected in the future.
With the evaluation “we are better equipped to deal with the future,” said Bamzi. “We cannot be an ostrich and put the head in the sand and let it go.”
The climate scientist at the University of Texas Tech, Katharine Hayhoe, also the main scientist of Nature Conservancy, said that the two organizations come together to make this report “is a testimony of how important it is that the last science is summarized and available.”
Hayhoe, who was the main author of the reports in 2009, 2018 and 2023, said that “people are not aware of how climate change is affecting the decisions they are making today, be it the size of the storm sewer pipes that they are installing, either the expansion of the flooding zone where people are building, whether the increases in extreme heat.”
They need that knowledge to discover how to adapt to damages in the future and even the present, said Hayhoe.
The national evaluation, unlike the global United Nations documents, highlights what is happening with the climate not only in the nation but at regional and local level.
Jones said he hopes that the version of the evaluation of societies can be done in just one year.
The latest Climate Evaluation ReportRun in 2023, he said that climate change is “damaging health and physical, mental, spiritual and community welfare through the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events, the increase in cases of infectious diseases and transmitted by vectors, and decrease in the quality of food and water and safety.”
In 2018, during Trump’s first termThe evaluation was equally forceful and said: “Climate change creates new risks and exacerbates existing vulnerabilities in the communities of the United States, presenting increasing challenges to human health and security, the quality of life and the rate of economic growth.”
But the climate scientist at the University of Illinois, Donald Wuebbles, who led one of the two national reports of 2018, said he cares why type of document will try to issue this new administration, if applicable.
“I think they will publish something that, as, will be scientifically based, but it will be quite horrible,” Wuebbles told Associated Press.
Watering or killing the national evaluation will not maintain the message about the importance of climate change when leaving, Wuebbles said. The efforts of scientific societies to fill the void will have some value because it will be a statement from the scientific community and, in the end, said science about data and observations.
“We know that this is an extremely important problem. We know that they are human activities that drive it. So, the question is: what are you doing about it?” Wuebbles said.
Storms and forest fires do not care if it is a red state or a blue state, said Hayhoe.
“Climate change affects us all,” said Hayhoe. “It doesn’t matter how we vote.”
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