On Monday afternoon, over 400 scientists nationwide were told they would no longer be contributing to the writing of a significant climate change study for the federal government.
Under the Global Change Research Act of 1990, Congress required the National Climate Assessment, a significant publication that summarizes the effects of climate change in the United States, to be issued every four years.
Preparations for the sixth edition have been going on for months in order to achieve the release date of 2027.
In order to prepare for the effects of climate change, comprehend future estimates of climate risk, and learn how to adapt and minimize those difficulties, federal, state, and municipal governments, as well as private organizations, rely on the National Climate Assessment.
The deputy director of services for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a federal office that coordinates the report’s publication, sent an email to participants that said, “Thank you for your participation in the 6th National Climate Assessment… we are now releasing all current assessment participants from their roles.”
The email claims that the White House has confirmed that the “scope” of the study is being “reevaluated” as the Trump administration seeks to adhere to the law.
However, a lot of people in the scientific community are worried about how the report will be prepared without the subject matter expertise of the hundreds of researchers and scientists who voluntarily worked on it for the government, many of whom were not federal employees.
“The Trump administration has dismissed all the scientists from their work on the nation’s most important climate change report,” Steven Hamburg, chief scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, stated. “Refusing to study climate change won’t make it go away – or help us deal with stronger storms, droughts, floods, wildfires and hotter temperatures, or help us stop emitting the pollution that is making it worse.”
The change is not a huge surprise because Project 2025 laid out a strategy to restructure the report and the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which organizes it. The authors of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy roadmap for the next Republican president, made the case that publications like NCA should incorporate “diverse viewpoints” and that bureaucratic institutions like USGCRP shouldn’t have such a strong hold.
The steps to achieve this were established a few weeks ago when the contract for outside labor to publish the NCA was terminated in early April, and numerous federal employees of the USGCRP were laid off.
The majority of scientists claimed they anticipated the news when asked how they felt about their knowledge being rendered unnecessary.
Dr. Mijin Cha, a professor of climate and environmental justice at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a co-author of this year’s assessment, believes it is important that no report of record that can withstand a thorough scientific evaluation of previous national assessments has been released.
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There are still concerns that the Trump administration may press forward with its own study, assigning authors who represent other perspectives on climate change, even though many in the scientific community have started to discuss how to proceed.
The Trump administration is legally required to follow the Global Change Research Act of 1990, which requires the NCA to be prepared. The administration has until the end of 2027 to create the sixth version of the report.
