Trump and the GOP may be trying to kneecap climate research | Dana Nuccitelli

While Trump claims to be open-minded on climate, there are ominous signs that Republicans will try to slash climate research

Last week, Donald Trump’s space policy advisor Bob Walker made headlines by suggesting that the incoming administration might slash Nasa’s climate and earth science research to focus the agency on deep space exploration. This caused great concern in the scientific community, because Nasa does some of the best climate research in the world, and its Earth science program does much more. Walker suggested the earth science research could be shifted to other agencies, but climate scientist Michael Mann explained what would result:

It’s difficult enough for us to build and maintain the platforms that are necessary for measuring how the oceans are changing, how the atmosphere is changing, with the infrastructure that we have when we total up the contributions from all of the agencies ... we [could] lose forever the possibility of the continuous records that we need so that we can monitor this planet.

The fact that they have reported temperature that they said was the highest temperatures...in history...it turned out that they were only 39% sure of that figure. Well that’s a press release, not a scientific kind of statement. I’m interested in scientific integrity. I’m interested not in scientific analysis that goes to a politically correct outcome.

I don’t think it’s the vast majority of climatologists who believe that [global warming is happening and man-made] ... among climatologists there is still a debate about the causes of the global warming. And so I think that debate is healthy, and I am entirely concerned about the fact that some of the climatologists that do not buy into the orthodoxy are being prevented from even having their works published.

the number of skeptical qualified scientists has been growing steadily; I would guess it is about 40% now.

97% of working climate scientists say the temperature is rising, and human activity is a significant contributing factor.