Dread and determination: how climate scientists are preparing for Trump 2.0

Anxiety, uncertainty and a renewed sense of purpose are surging in the community

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to increase US fossil-fuel production.Credit: Matt Smith/Alamy

Washington DC

If Donald Trump follows through on promises for his second term as US president, he will unleash sweeping changes in climate policy within hours or days of his inauguration on 20 January. Among the shifts, he could pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement for the second time, roll back air-pollution regulations and open public lands for fossil-fuel development.

Many climate scientists are bracing themselves. “There is obviously dread about the prospect of a repeat of what the previous [Trump] administration did, which was very damaging and which has not been undone completely,” says Juan Declet-Barreto, senior social scientist for climate vulnerability at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington DC last week, some of the 30,000 attendees expressed determination to rise to the challenge — whether through activism or by improving their public communication about the climate crisis.

“This may come as a surprise, but I feel a little bit rejuvenated,” says Eric Steig, a polar researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle. “To the extent that people don’t believe scientists are nonpartisan, here’s our opportunity to continue to do good solid science and demonstrate that.” He adds: “I almost feel like: here’s an exciting opportunity to do my job better.”

Saving their data

During Trump’s first term, from 2017 to 2021, he appointed officials who restricted discussions of climate science across federal agencies and tried to upend the scientific consensus that human activities are warming the planet. Although it isn’t yet clear what he’ll be able to achieve during his second term, Trump has hired many people associated with a conservative policy blueprint known as Project 2025, which calls for ending US leadership of global climate efforts. It includes recommendations to dismantle the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which provides weather forecasts and crucial climate monitoring, and to slash the regulatory power of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

A number of scientists employed at federal agencies declined to speak to Nature on the record, fearing that it could endanger their jobs — Trump has said he will make it easier to fire federal employees soon after he takes office. Some researchers are already preparing financially in case they lose their jobs, or downloading private copies of e-mails and work-related data, some of which became inaccessible during the first Trump administration.

Others, not employed by the government, are looking at ways to preserve climate data sets that rely on government data. One such grass-roots effort, led by a collaboration known as the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, formed in 2016, before the first Trump presidency. “We are trying to identify what are the most-used tools that are potentially endangered,” says Dan Pisut, a senior principal engineer at the geographic-information-systems company Esri in Redlands, California. For example, “if you’re a farmer, and you don’t have information on drought-forecasting conditions, that’s a problem”.

The focus is not just on archiving federal data, but on finding ways to repurpose the information and distribute it to stakeholders who need it. For instance, Trump’s team has said it will slash programmes focusing on environmental equity — so data sets such as the EPA’s EJScreen, a tool for mapping the communities most at risk from environmental threats, are of interest for saving. These communities are often low-income and located in regions with high levels of pollution.