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Here’s How the Shutdown Is Delaying Climate Data and Undercutting Scientists

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Here’s How the Shutdown Is Delaying Climate Data and Undercutting Scientists
By
Kendra Pierre-Louis
, New York Times

If you want official numbers on how 2018 ranks in the annals of recent record-breaking temperatures, you’ll have to wait.

One result of the government shutdown, now in its fourth week, is that NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are unable to issue their annual temperature analysis. And, because that data is so widely used, neither can some other governments.

For example, Britain’s national weather and climate monitoring service, the Met Office, publishes its own global temperature estimates that incorporate NOAA data but use a slightly different analytical method. That’s important because when many different analyses show the same trend — in this case, rising global temperatures — it helps give researchers confidence that their work is sound. But, the NOAA data that the Met Office needs is currently offline.

“Usually, we would have received it by now,” said John Kennedy, a scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre, which specializes in climate research. “But this month, we haven’t.”

The global temperature numbers are not the only climate and environmental data that would have been reported by now if not for the government shutdown.

This time last year, for example, Americans knew that 2017 ranked as the most costly year on record for natural disasters, many of them — like Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, and the drought that struck the Great Plains — linked to climate change.

NOAA has issued the disaster-cost estimate since 1980, but that information is not yet available for last year, which saw Hurricanes Michael and Florence, and a wildfire season that some call the deadliest and most destructive in California’s history.

Researchers say those data delays are mostly just a nuisance. It is unlikely, for example, that when the temperature data is issued it will differ significantly from preliminary estimates that placed 2018 as the fourth-warmest year on record (The Japan Meteorological Agency has issued its preliminary estimates saying as much).

They call the interruption of key scientific research, though, a much bigger problem that will have longer lasting repercussions.

“I’ve heard stories of research projects that had to be discontinued or stopped, and that’s thousands of dollars and in some cases, thousands of hours of time that is lost is wasted,” said Bob Peterson, president of the Entomological Society of America and a professor at Montana State University.

It is a bit like a child with an ant farm who goes on vacation for a month and then comes back. It’s unlikely those ants will fare well. Except, in this case, there is a lot more at stake.

Insect research may seem obscure, but Peterson noted that it helps to protect homes from destructive bugs like termites and secures our food system by helping farmers mitigate crop pests. That is especially important in the era of climate change because farmers are having to deal with invasive pests as ecosystems shift.

It can even save lives. There are several insects, like mosquitoes and the invasive Asian longhorn tick, that transmit diseases — to people, livestock and pets — that are the focus of at least some of the roughly 500 federal entomologists currently furloughed.

“You just can’t turn the lights off and close the door and then when the government reopens, come back and turn on the lights and open the door and the turn the computer on and, OK, now everything’s fine and we’re going again,” Peterson said.

Even researchers who do not work for the federal government are affected.

“We have a researcher studying mosquitoes, and her lab colony of mosquitoes collapsed,” Peterson said. “The only way to resurrect it is to get mosquito eggs from a government stock.” The shutdown, though, means the government isn’t currently supplying them.

Perhaps the greatest effect, cautioned Chris Horvat, a polar oceanographer based at Brown University, is the chilling effect the government shutdown is having on early-career researchers.

Although Horvat is based at Brown, he is also part of the NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Program, a competitive fellowship that the agency has offered since 1990 to help early-career scientists do climate research. Officially, the eight fellows are government contractors, not employees, which means they cannot expect back pay for time they do not work. Their contract administrator has them on a reduced salary of roughly half pay, but that is set to run out in three weeks, Horvat said.

“We’re basically not able to, you know, pay for travel or go to do research stuff,” Horvat said. “We’re all super early career so having money is essential. We don’t have grants, you know, we don’t have support from anywhere else.”

“We’re supposed to be the future of climate science and we can’t do our jobs.”

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