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Georgia climate scientists are raising concerns about federal changes they say could hamper research and hurt their overall understanding of climate change. They warn the threat isn’t just to science; farmers, weather forecasters and emergency planners all rely on climate and weather information that’s now at risk.
The Trump administration has taken several steps in recent weeks that alarm climate scientists, including dismissing National Climate Assessment authors and cutting or interrupting funding to key weather, forecasting and data programs.
The White House’s new budget request to Congress includes billions of dollars of cuts to the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which pay for important research and programs in Georgia.
The National Climate Assessment is a behemoth of a report taking stock of all the most recent research on climate change and laying out the current and future impacts around the country.
It comes out every four years, by Congressional mandate. It’s a huge undertaking that takes a lot of time, said University of Georgia climatologist Pam Knox.
“As soon as one is published, the next group is already starting,” said Knox, one of the authors of the last assessment, which came out about a year and a half ago.
The next is due in 2027, but with the authors dismissed, the status of it is uncertain. That will make it harder for Georgia leaders, Knox said, because the climate assessment highlights the most critical threats to the region.
“If we don’t have good information about that, it’s very difficult to respond to what’s likely to be occurring,” she said. “If you can’t respond, you’re going to have more economic losses.”
Other recent changes and cuts concerned Knox as well.
Regional Climate Centers that provide key information about past weather to everyone from farmers to electric companies to historians briefly went offline last month due to a lapse in their federal funding; Knox co-authored an op-ed advocating for their restoration.
Databases full of information on ocean currents, estuaries and the Earth’s geology are becoming harder to access. Fewer weather balloons are going up. NOAA has announced it will no longer be updating its database of weather and climate disasters that cause at least $1 billion in damage, an important tool for contextualizing storm damage and showing how it has increased over time.
Knox said changes like this will make things harder, both for researchers and for forecasters at the National Weather Service.
“It’s not like they’re going to go away, but they’re just going to be hampered in their ability to do the best job that they could,” she said of NWS forecasters.
Further cuts to NOAA, the agency that houses the Weather Service, and other federal departments could be coming if Congress follows the changes laid out in the recent White House budget request.
Clark Alexander, director of the University of Georgia’s Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, said the proposed cuts to the National Science Foundation would harm the research done at institutions like UGA and Georgia Tech.
The cuts would defund much of the “curiosity-driven research that doesn’t necessarily have a payoff tomorrow but may form the building blocks for great advances that might occur over the next decade or so,” Alexander said.
Some of the proposed cuts to NOAA, meanwhile, would hit closer to home for Georgia’s coastal economy, particularly the Sea Grant program.
“The Georgia Sea Grant program has been the driving force behind developing aquaculture in our state,” Alexander said, pointing to the state’s burgeoning homegrown oyster industry. “They’ve also worked with shrimpers. They’ve worked with people that work on the water in a variety of different ways.”
NOAA is involved in life and research on the Georgia coast in many other ways, too, including management of the Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary and the annual effort to track North Atlantic right whales giving birth offshore.
The agency did not respond to a request for comment, but has previously said it remains committed to providing timely information, research, and resources. The White House did not respond to questions from NPR about the National Climate Assessment.
This budget is just a proposal and still has to go through Congress, though federal research funding is already facing other cutbacks and changes, including a recently-announced change in funding for indirect expenses like laboratory maintenance that Alexander said could severely hamper researchers’ ability to pay for their work. That and many other cuts are likely to be challenged in court – likely a lengthy process.
In the meantime, Alexander said, the disruption could have long-term impacts both for the public’s understanding of science and for the new researchers and policymakers just entering their fields.
“In some ways we are slowing down the development and the training and the handing off of management and research to a new generation by cutting all these programs,” he said.