The Trump Administration cut funding and dismissed staff at the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which releases a Congressionally-mandated assessment of climate change every few years. It’s unclear if the program will be revived in the summer legislative budget. Northern Arizona University climate scientist Ted Schuur spoke about the loss of American expertise.
What effect will that have on the science of climate change research?
There’s a lot of important science being done and scientists are basically paid to look under every rock and find every detail, but these reports take that information, the really detailed information, and communicate it in a way that can be really used by people and policymakers. And so if you’re not bringing together the science synthesis, then it really undermines the actionable potential of science. So, people are doing good science, but we have to put it in a format that can be used and that’s what these reports were good at.
Okay, so the idea was you take this information that’s kind of hidden away in peer-reviewed journals, and you summarize it in a way that anyone can understand and make use of.
Yeah, these reports kind of translated the science. They took lots of detailed studies that focused on all the intricacies, but then you might read 20 papers and you have to make some summary statement, and that’s what these reports were doing, and the summary statements are what allows people to make a decision about the future, or how to invest their money, or what to do with planting their crops, for example. That kind of information you wouldn’t be reading this primary literature, but you’d be looking to these reports to give you the summary of that.
Can you give some examples—for folks who live here Northern Arizona, where are seeing the impacts of climate change?
Climate change is felt throughout the state. We’re in the semiarid southwest, we’re in a drying trend, so we’ve had decreased snow and rain over the last 15 or 20 years. We’re in the middle of megadrought. That megadrought, science has shown has been made worse by warming. That’s one example. Our limited water supplies are decreasing, and we need to know how to allocate the water that we have left. A completely different example, if you live in the City of Phoenix, where you have hot summers, those are getting hotter, and there’s a lot of science focused on how people will adapt to those changes. So understanding what summer conditions are going to look like in Phoenix and how people are going to respond to that is a really important outcome of something like this. And then maybe lastly, fires, which are part of our ecosystems, they’re a natural disturbance cycle is what we would say, but they’re changing in their scope in Arizona. We see places catching fire in times of year that aren’t normal for us, and so understanding what’s going to happen in the future, how to protect infrastructure against these wildfires is also another key area of science interest and public concern.
For policymakers, decisions makers who are acting on these issues—wildfire, drought, trying to make decisions—are there alternative places where they can go get this information?
The great thing about science is it’s international, and really the global community of scientists are in communication. I do think this science is so important that it will happen at the international level. Now, it turned out in the past 50 years the U.S. was the leader on doing science and science synthesis, and we actually brought the best minds of the world to the U.S. to contribute to our nation-building. And really now, the current climate, shall I say, is reversing that trend. People are thinking about going elsewhere. There’s scientists meeting outside the U.S., they’re not necessarily wanting to travel here. So it’s kind of changing the nature of that. But for someone like myself, I can still communicate with these colleagues, and we can still put together this information, but it’s probably going to be led by other counties and other places, we won’t continue to be the leader on this.
Ted Schuur, thank you so much for speaking with me.
You’re welcome.
Learn more about the National Climate Assessment: https://nca2023.globalchange.gov/
