American Scientists Continue To Contribute To Next IPCC Assessment, Though Numbers Down 80% From Last Cycle
Even as the U.S. federal government rapidly retreats from science-based decision-making, adopts climate-damaging energy policies and disengages from international climate efforts, 46 American researchers have been chosen as authors for the upcoming three main global climate reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The number of U.S. scientists working on the IPCC reports has decreased markedly over the past decade, from 210 during the panel’s 5th assessment cycle to 46 in the current cycle, according to the panel’s records. But there are still more Americans or scientists with dual citizenship and U.S. university affiliations contributing to the reports than from any other country.
Former NASA chief scientist and senior climate adviser Katherine Calvin, whose role with the international panel was unclear after the Trump administration fired her from the federal agency, is among them. She will co-chair one of the three main assessment groups, IPCC Chair Jim Skea said last week. “Kate is there and we see no route to her leaving that role in the future,” he said. Calvin, a climate modeling expert, made significant contributions to previous IPCC reports, he added, and will now help guide the structure and direction of the entire climate mitigation working group, with 222 scientists, including 15 other U.S. climate researchers.
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The U.S. science community is also organizing at other levels, including coordinating a response to a climate report issued by the U.S. Department of Energy several weeks ago, she said. The AGU and the American Meteorological Society have also teamed up to publish a collection of papers to update information from a National Climate Assessment formerly compiled and issued by the federal government but canceled by the Trump administration. Another group of international scientists is networking to establish independent, distributed systems for storing and sharing scientific information, specifically aimed at protecting science from authoritarian threats.
The threats come from oligarchs acting in their own financial self-interest and that of their political allies, which are often nationalist, populist and authoritarian parties and governments worldwide, University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann and Baylor University health researcher Peter Hotez write in a new book. “Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces that Threaten Our World” is scheduled for release in early September.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30082025/us-climate-research-ipcc/