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President Trump will be inaugurated on 20 January. We don’t yet know what a Trump presidency will look like, but some of the policies he and his team have already floated would have irreversible ramifications. But resistance is far from futile, as we explore in this four-part special.

Read more about how to resist the coming surveillance state

Read more about how women can protect their reproductive rights with contraception and abortion in doubt




Read more about the strange and surprising silver linings of his chaotic nuclear policy

THE Climate forecast for the next four years is bleak. Donald Trump notoriously tweeted in 2012 that global warming was a hoax created by China to damage US manufacturing. As president-elect, he has chosen a climate change denialist to head the Environmental Protection Agency, and his pick for the helm of the energy department (DOE) is Rick Perry, who once suggested dismantling it.

If CO 2 emissions rise faster as a result, the consequences for the global climate will be dire. “We can’t take a four-year break,” says Marcia DeLonge at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in Washington DC.

But a Trump presidency won’t just be a problem for climate change – it could also spell trouble for the scientists trying to stave it off.

In December, the Trump transition team asked for a list of DOE employees and contractors who worked on climate change or had attended climate change meetings. The agency refused, but the incident has sent a chill through the scientific community, particularly in the light of the Republicans’ revival of the Holman rule, which means specific federal employees can have their pay slashed to $1, effectively dismissing them.

Climate scientists’ fears of being targeted are legitimate. There has already been an uptick in Freedom of Information Act requests for their private emails, says Peter Fontaine, the lawyer who defended climate scientist Michael Mann in a high-profile case against the State of Virginia. If such tactics also came from within their own agencies, federal scientists might leave en masse.

Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the UCS in Cambridge, Massachussetts, says this would permanently erode federal agencies’ ability to use science to inform policy decisions. His message to scientists is unequivocal: “Please don’t leave,” he says. “If you leave we’ll lose your ability to know what’s going on.”

But if they do stay, they may be forced to stop pursuing certain lines of research anyway. The Trump transition team suggested as much when it said NASA should shift its focus away from “politically correct environmental monitoring”.

Fears that data could be misused or altered have prompted crowd-sourcing to back up federal climate and environmental data, including Climate Mirror, a distributed volunteer effort supported by the Internet Archive and the Universities of Pennsylvania and Toronto.

Can that work be done elsewhere? Several programmes are trying to decentralise the process of collecting new data. Even before the election, NASA was planning a programme to buy Earth science data from commercial CubeSats, shoebox-sized satellites that can be built and launched cheaply. “We can do really serious science with CubeSats now,” MIT’s William Blackwell told the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

At a pinch, some agency-level work could be done by individual states. “If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite,” California governor Jerry Brown told the AGU meeting. “We’re going to collect that data.”

One unexpected consequence of a Trump presidency is that it may spur more scientists to advocacy. Many are already circulating petitions and open letters, and organising groups. “We don’t want to be here. We want to be doing the work we were trained to do,” said Naomi Oreskes at Harvard University at a protest rally during the AGU meeting. “But we are at a moment in history where we have to stand up.”

Beating the heat How can scientists protect themselves when their work comes under political fire? Peter Fontaine at the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund recommends that researchers at public universities get to know their legal counsel, so that the school will back them if a suit is filed. Further legal assistance is available from organisations like Fontaine’s. He also advises that scientists practice good email hygiene, writing them as if they’ll be shown in court, and scrupulously keeping personal and work emails separate. And adding a footer noting that the contents are exempt from freedom of information laws – if they are – may help too.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Climate scientists fight Trump’s chilling effects”