Boulder, United States | AFP | Muser NewsDesk
Waleed Abdalati, director of an influential environmental research center in Colorado, says the administration of US President Donald Trump‘s attempts to stifle climate research are putting US interests at risk.
Abdalati, a former chief scientist at NASA, is concerned about the government’s bid to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and wider cuts to federal funding for the scientific community.
His Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which employs about 900 people, has been directly affected.
From February to mid-April, federal funding for the Global Monitoring Laboratory (GML), a standardbearer in the collection of atmospheric data, has been frozen.
As a result, 42 people were on the verge of being fired, until the money was unblocked.
Interview
Here are select excerpts from AFP’s interview with Abdalati:
QUESTION: What does this federal funding freeze mean?
Abdalati: “What I was told was this direction came from the Office of Management and Budget, and if I go by past statements of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget [Russ Vought], he has made very clear that he views it as his responsibility to ensure that the money spent aligns with priorities of the president. (…) The challenge with that is Congress appropriated the money. So Congress said, ‘You will spend this money on this function.’ And so for the administration to supplant the congressional direction with its own assessment is not how the system works… I don’t want to ascribe bad intentions. It’s hard for me not to.”
Q: How does this kind of decision disrupt research?
Abdalati: “People are not doing the research. People are not able to recruit the graduate students. People have had to lay off technicians to run lab equipment, and in some cases, simply because the machinery stuck. The National Science Foundation isn’t reviewing proposals at the rate they previously did. (…) So this slows down the research.
“History has shown our national competitiveness is tied to our strength in the sciences and engineering, our research and so to compromise it in such a way, I believe, compromises national interests. And this is at a time when China, for example, is increasing its spending on academic research. It concerns me.”
Q: Is it too soon to talk about brain drain?
Abdalati: “I think there’s a risk, not just in Boulder, but on the national landscape. The national landscape really isn’t that bad, if you look at the congressional budgets, but what people see is an administration that says, ‘We don’t value this. We don’t think it’s important. We think it’s a hoax.’ (…) Even though Congress has allocated the funding, it’s not that clear that the government will be able to spend it by the end of the fiscal year when it needs to be spent, because there have been these delays. Now, a cynic would argue that’s by design.”
Q: Court documents in the NCAR case show that the White House was planning to separate weather research from climate research, and then cut the latter. Can they truly be separated?
Abdalati: “Environmental atmospheric science — it doesn’t distinguish between weather and climate. It’s simply physics, and we take what we understand about physics and try to propagate that into the future to tell us what the future might look like. That future might be tomorrow. It might be a month from now, might be 20 years from now. No one can argue that there isn’t value to knowing what the future is going to hold. And I think pursuing that information, that knowledge, in and of itself, is of national interest.”
ube/sst/pnb
© Agence France-Presse
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by Ulysse Bellier | AFP
Featured image: Waleed Abdalati, then NASA chief scientist, speaks at a Mars Science Laboratory press conference at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington on July 22, 2011. (cropped image) Credit: NASA HQ PHOTO | Flickr | CC BY-NC-ND
