Trump’s Climate Threats Rattle Biggest Science Meeting

Censorship. Funding cuts. Layoffs.

Those concerns loom over the world’s largest conference of climate scientists as they brace for whiplash at the White House when President-elect Donald Trump takes office in six weeks. Trump has recently said climate change isn’t happening, called it a hoax and joked that rising seas would create more coastal real estate — all in contradiction to the work of the 25,000 researchers attending the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in downtown Washington this week.

“Everybody at AGU is nervous,” Jill Brandenberger, climate security program manager at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said in an interview. “The unknown is what makes people nervous.”