The Dec. 19 news article “Trump officials will dismantle ‘global mothership’ of climate forecasting” reflected the shortsightedness of the current administration’s climate policy.
First, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s goal of keeping increases in average ambient temperatures to below 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels has already been breached in many regions. This is evident from my analyses of the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations for in situ measurements on ambient temperatures from more than 8,500 worldwide weather stations. Thus, there is nothing alarmist about the National Center for Atmospheric Research's climate forecasting, which is based on averaging the temperatures in different seasons for the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
Second, the oceans absorb a high proportion of the heat emission from land as well as CO2 emissions. Because of that, higher sea surface temperatures and ocean acidification are exacerbating the melting of sea and polar ice thereby reducing the albedo effects and raising the sea levels. Subsidizing renewable energy generation can help to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations to some degree.
Lastly, though scientific advances such as assessing thicknesses of glaciers via remote sensing satellites have produced large amounts of data, such measurements need to be corroborated by in situ measurements that require greater resources. The U.S. has been a leader in compiling data on climate indicators. The Trump administration, or its successor, needs to urgently reverse these irrational cuts so that researchers can facilitate the formulation of evidence-based climate policies.