Extreme Temperature Diary- Monday February 24th, 2025/ Main Topic: How Trump Could Be Derailing a Major Global Climate Report

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The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉

Main Topic: How Trump Could Be Derailing a Major Global Climate Report

Dear Diary. Today’s action was expected. Trump will likely attempt to stop all efforts to report and record what is happening with our climate during his administration. The first signs are coming from NASA. Apparently, a group of scientists have been barred from working on the IPCC 4th climate assessment. Without them that report will be either delayed or derailed entirely.

Trump and his fossil fuel fascist authoritarian cronies would obviously love to blind the U.S. on climate measurement since they can yell, “See, there is no problem here. So, let’s drill baby drill.” This coming as the planet starts to warm past +1.5°C above preindustrial conditions, the first IPCC line that it is not recommended that humanity cross.

Here are more details on this insanity from the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/02/22/trump-federal-scientists-climate-work-ipcc

How Trump could be derailing a major global climate report

The Trump administration’s actions in recent days have cast unprecedented uncertainty upon the climate panel’s work.

Updated 2/23/2025

Katherine Calvin, NASA chief scientist and senior climate adviser, at a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington in 2023. (Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images)

By Scott Dance

The Trump administration has blocked work that is central to major international climate change research, and barred federal scientists and diplomats from attending a key global climate event in China this week, according to three officials close to the situation who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Katherine Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate adviser, has been barred from traveling to China to meet with colleagues on work related to the next major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N. body that makes regular assessments about the state of the warming world. The next report is expected in 2029, and Calvin is leading one of three major IPCC working groups.

NASA also terminated its contract with a U.S.-based group of scientists and staff who were working closely with Calvin to coordinate global efforts to craft the next assessment, essentially leaving one-third of the IPCC’s next report adrift, with no staff assigned to pull it together.

The actions in recent days — the new administration’s most significant to curb government work on climate change, which President Donald Trump has called a “hoax” — have cast unprecedented uncertainty upon the climate panel’s work, which aims to synthesize the most up-to-date human understanding of the planet’s warming and what can be done to stop it.

“The U.S. government is throwing a heavy amount of sand in the gears,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University who has been involved in every major IPCC report since the first one in 1990.

White House officials could not be reached for comment Saturday.

IPCC spokesman Andrej Mahecic said in an email early Sunday that officials had “seen several media reports citing anonymous sources” about the Trump administration’s actions but that they had “not received any official communication regarding any change in the status” of the U.S.-based team.

“While awaiting more clarity, we refrain from speculating or commenting on this matter,” Mahecic said.

Past IPCC reports have made clear that human burning of fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect have the planet on the brink of catastrophic levels of warming that have already decimated wildlife populations, harmed agricultural productivity, allowed infectious diseases to thrive and caused weather disasters to intensify.

Since the last major IPCC report was published in 2023, global average temperatures have soared to even higher extremes: Last year was the first in which global temperatures surged 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial averages.

Based on decades of work by thousands of scientists around the world, the IPCC has long warned of massive global consequences if humans cannot stop temperatures from exceeding that threshold for years or decades at a time.

The group of 10 scientists and staff who were working under the NASA contractstill have their jobs, the three officials said, but have been blocked from doing any IPCC-related work since Feb. 14.

They served as project managers for one of three main IPCC working groups, theirs focused on climate change “mitigation” — ways humans can reduce emissions of planet-warming gases or lower concentrations of those gases already in the atmosphere. The group is formally known as the Technical Support Unit for the IPCC’s Working Group III and works under the Washington-based U.S. Global Change Research Program, created by Congress in 1990 to coordinate with 15 U.S. agencies on the government response to global environmental change.

The office is the only one supporting an IPCC working group that is based in the United States or supported by the U.S. government. Scientists working for two similar groups, focused on the science and the impacts of climate change, are largely based in France, China, the Netherlands and Singapore.

Calvin is the only one of six co-chairs of the three IPCC working groups who is from the United States. It is not yet clear whether she will be allowed to continue serving in that role. Calvin could not be reached for comment.

The meeting Calvin was barred from attending was scheduled to begin Monday in Hangzhou, China. There, scientists were set to finalize outlines for what the three working groups would contribute to the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report, as well as to review methodology on technologies that aim to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it.

The outlines would guide work on dozens of chapters that will make up the assessment. If they cannot be approved as scheduled, it will set back further work on the report, the officials said.

That includes the selection of hundreds of authors who craft each chapter of the report. That process cannot begin until the IPCC finalizes the next chapter’s outline.

The IPCC chooses the authors from a list of nominees provided during each cycle by the State Department and other diplomatic offices around the world. Typically, scientists from U.S. universities and government agencies make up a large proportion of report authors.

Climate change and global warming

HAND CURATED

By Scott Dance Scott Dance is a reporter for The Washington Post covering extreme weather news and the intersections between weather, climate, society and the environment. He joined The Post in 2022 after more than a decade at the Baltimore Sun. Follow on X ssdance

Here are more “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:

Here is More Climate News from Monday:

(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)

More from the Weather Department:

Today’s News on Sustainable Energy, Traditional Polluting Energy from Fossil Fuel, and the Green Revolution:

More on the Environment, Nature and Science:

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Guy Walton… “The Climate Guy“

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