Trump Plans to Abandon NASA's Climate Change Research

Donald Trump plans to make decisions based on "solid science," is scrapping NASA's climate change funding.

November 23, 2016

President-elect Donald Trump's administration plans to abandon NASA research into climate change, according to The Guardian. Bob Walker, who is senior adviser to Trump on matters related to NASA during the transition, told the Guardian the Trump administration would be putting an end to "politicized science."

Walker, who has in the past called climate change research "politically correct environmental monitoring," according to the Guardian, says NASA will pursue deep-space exploration, adding that "Earth-centric science is better placed at other agencies where it is their prime mission."

Walker also said Trump, who once claimed climate change is a "hoax" created by the Chinese government, would be making decisions about climate change based on "solid science:"

Despite the fact that, for years, the global scientific community has demonstrated the real and present effects of a changing climate, primarily due to human-made environmental damage, the president-elect said on Tuesday he thinks there is only "some connectivity" between humans and climate change.

NASA has been at the forefront of developing instruments and tools for monitoring climate change, so a loss of funding would be "a major setback if not devastating" for the climate change research community, according to Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.