Will the US Sabotage Global Climate Science?

It’s difficult to overstate just how fundamental the federal shift toward explicit, proactive climate denial is in the recent history of Earth science. In the 1980s and 1990s, the US was at the forefront of bringing together scientists from across the world to build the very first models mimicking how the climate operates at a global scale. Data about the atmosphere, the oceans and more collected by nations in Europe, as well as countries like Japan and Argentina, helped us answer whether global climate changes were part of natural variability or a result of human activity. The USGCRP made much of this early coordination possible. 

The USGCRP also assists in nominating US scientists to participate in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC, however flawed, is the world’s window into understanding how the Earth’s climate is changing. Every five to seven years, it releases reports thousands of pages long, summarizing the latest research on everything from rising sea levels, bleached coral reefs, and the warming atmosphere to the amount of money it will take to protect people from worsening disasters and the steps society must take to limit the unfolding damage.

The last time the IPCC released a major report was from 2021 to 2023. The next one will be released toward the end of Trump’s second term. Although about 185 countries nominate scientists as authors and contribute research, less than two dozen governments volunteer money and labor to produce the reports. It’s never been a perfect process, and powerful nations with a vested interest in fossil fuels — Saudi Arabia, China, even the US under Democratic presidents — have long exerted influence on the final reports. 

Despite Trump pulling out of the Paris Agreement, American scientists and representatives still participated in the IPCC in his first presidency, though the US delegation didn’t lead any of the working groups that compose the three main parts of the report. That’s not the case now. Under Biden, according to sources who participated in the creation of the last IPCC report, US delegates successfully lobbied for a greater role in the new report due out in 2028/2029. The goal was to send a message that US climate leadership was back after a Trump hiatus.

The Chief Scientist at NASA, Katherine Calvin, is leading the IPCC working group focused on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions that are heating the atmosphere. The USGCRP is managing logistics for Calvin and other members of the US delegation at the IPCC and is also contracting out the actual production of the third part of the report to the NOAA Assessment Technical Support Unit, which is composed of a team at North Carolina State University.

The bottom line is that the US is playing a much greater role in the IPCC process than it did the last time around. That participation is going to cost money, maybe a few million dollars a year. It’s not clear where that funding would come from, though it could be drawn from the State Department. It may be a drop in the trillions that make up the US budget, but as Trump allows Musk unfettered access into federal departments ostensibly as part of a cost-cutting mission, the US’s IPCC work checks all the boxes of stuff he and his Project 2025 acolytes want to destroy. International work on climate is clearly in Trump’s sights: An Executive Order signaled the US’s intent to pull out of the Paris Agreement. Reuters reported that the president cancelled $4 billion in pledges to a UN fund that finances adaptations to climate change in developing nations.  

It’s too early to say how the president’s assault on international climate collaboration could undermine the IPCC. The good news, for now, is that there aren’t any other national governments with the same level of influence or wealth that have plunged so deeply into extremist anti-science and far-right nationalism. If the US falters at the IPCC, in theory another nation could step in. 

But just because the US is at the vanguard of this particular global current doesn’t mean other nations won’t follow in its wake. In Europe, nationalists have similarly bashed climate-saving policies as decadent and part of a war on the working class by a globalist elite. Even in relatively deep-blue California, Republicans and the oil industry have seized on rising energy bills to malign clean energy policies. Sometimes they have a point, but mostly it’s a cynical ploy to weaken public resolve for cutting emissions.

And the worst news, of course, is that even with a functional IPCC process and other international collaborations on climate change, human societies are still failing to meet the challenge of climate change. To take just one example, the vast majority of countries missed a February 10 deadline to submit goals for cutting emissions by 2035, as required by the Paris Agreement. The US was one of the few that did—under Biden. 

The US is entering a very dark period for climate science—to say nothing of democracy itself— but even as it cedes its leadership role, that doesn’t mean the work will stop. Cataclysmic fires and floods signal the changes all around us, and scientists here and abroad are still connecting the dots. This past January was the world’s warmest on record (though weirdly, not in the US), following two of the hottest years ever. 

However we get through this political moment, there are still geopolitical dividends to be won by leaning into renewable energy and climate action. It’s fitting, then, that national delegates finalizing the outlines of the next IPCC reports will be meeting at the end of the month—in China.