Cutbacks may threaten climate studies

WASHINGTON — The government's climate change research is threatened by spending cuts that will reduce scientists' observations from space and on the ground, a study says.

A major problem, the National Research Council said Thursday, is the program director's lack of authority to organize spending and research among the 13 different agencies that study the impacts of climate.

Nonetheless, the report said, the U.S. Climate Change Research Program has made good progress "in documenting the climate changes of the past few decades and in unraveling the (human) influences on the observed climate changes."

In contrast, the report said progress in combining research results and supporting decisionmaking and risk management "has been inadequate."

The climate research program is "an important initiative that has broadened our knowledge of climate change, needs to package more of that knowledge for policymakers from the national to local level, and place more emphasis on understanding how people will be affected by climate change and how they might react," said committee chairman Veerabhadran Ramanathan, professor of atmospheric and climate sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.

The world has moved into an era when climate change is accepted as real, he said, and it is accepted that human activities are the major drivers for many of these changes.

But progress has been inadequate in determining how climate change will affect people, Ramanathan said in a briefing Thursday.

In its report the research council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, did not make recommendations on how to improve the program. That is expected to be included in a follow-up report next year.

William J. Brennan, deputy assistant secretary of Commerce and director of the climate change program, welcomed the report as helpful.

"I don't take any issue with their recommendations," Brennan said in a telephone interview, adding that program officials had arrived at some of the same conclusions.

The study expressed concern about delays, cutbacks and cancellations of programs that would maintain or add to climate change research.

"Knowledge of climate variability and change rests on consistent long-term observations that are broadly disseminated and archived for future generations of scientists," the report said.