In the nearly three months that Donald Trump has been in the White House, his administration has taken steps to scrap Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, make deep cuts in the Environmental Protection Agency, bolster production of fossil fuels, and slash climate and environmental research at federal agencies like NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the federally funded National Center for Atmospheric Research, discusses the practical implications of what he calls “the disdain for climate change and climate change research” within the Trump administration. He addresses the damage such cuts could inflict on international scientific collaborations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or even on our ability to track events like El Niño and extreme weather. He also talks about the additional burden scientists will bear over the next four years to protect their research from political interference.

If the U.S. dismantles its climate research, says Trenberth, “we start then really flying blind. It begins to ripple across the whole of the information and science that’s available, and it has implications for what we can say about what’s going to happen in the future.”

Yale Environment 360: President Trump has proposed drastic budget cuts to climate and environmental research. What impacts would such cuts have on the U.S. government’s capacity to track climate change?

Kevin Trenberth: There has been pressure on some organizations in climate science for several years, before Trump came in, especially from the House science committee, chaired by Representative Lamar Smith [R-Texas]. For NOAA, it has been quite devastating. I think it was 2012 when [NOAA] proposed a new line of organization called the climate service. They have a National Weather Service, and this would be actually a national climate service to go alongside that. As soon as Lamar Smith saw the word “climate,” the hammer came down and immediately there was a 30 percent cut in the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research arm of NOAA.

One of the consequences was that it hurt ocean observations. In 2014, along came the beginnings of an El Niño, and they found they didn’t have the information they needed to know exactly what was going on. There was a period of time when NOAA was running a little bit blind, and therefore the information and the forecast were not as good as they otherwise might have been. This is exactly the sort of thing that can happen all over again if you have, as the administration seems to have, this antipathy towards climate change.

There are also things that NOAA and other federal agencies don’t have the capabilities of doing in-house, so they have grants programs, which are apt to be cut. This affects universities profoundly. When that happens, students tend to go into other areas of research. Earlier this year at the American Meteorological Society meeting, there were graduate students and early-career scientists there that were already beginning to think twice about whether they really should go into climate science at all. This creates a drought in the future, so as people like myself and others retire, the good-quality people to replace us will be lost.

e360: What about the impacts on global collaborative research, things like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? How critical are U.S.-based scientists, data, and funding to such programs?

Trenberth: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the agreement that actually requires the U.S. and other countries around the world to gather information and to report their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If funding for that sort of thing is cut and lost, then the U.S. contribution [to climate change] is not reported, and it encourages other countries to not report, as well. A lot of information then gets lost, and we start really flying blind as to what other countries are doing to the atmosphere. It really begins to ripple across the whole of the information and science that’s available, and it has implications therefore for what we can say about what’s going to happen in the future.

e360: Government reports like the National Climate Assessment have been important in helping the public and local officials learn about and plan for the impacts of global warming. The next installment of the assessment is due in 2018. Is there any concern that the Trump administration could try to manipulate or skew the report? Has that ever happened under previous administrations?

Trenberth: In the past, under the George W. Bush administration, there was an attempt to alter some of the very high-level documents, the summary aspects, although they didn’t get down to the point of changing the underlying report itself. So, we’re concerned that this kind of thing could easily happen again, especially given some of the rhetoric that’s been going around about the disdain for climate change and climate change research.