An NCAR Climatologist On Why He's Leaving The US To Do His Research In France

[hatrack]

Last December, the French government announced the first group of foreign scientists to be awarded grants under its Make Our Planet Great Again program, French President Emmanuel Macron’s pointed response to Donald Trump’s move to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. U.S. scientists, Macron had said, should come to France to “work together on concrete solutions for our climate.” Among the first group of 18 researchers is Ben Sanderson, a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. In September, Sanderson will be heading to a climate laboratory in Toulouse, where he has received a five-year, $1.8 million grant to continue his work on modeling climate change and communicating those risks to society. Of the 18 researchers who will be moving to France, 13 are from United States universities and research institutions.

EDIT

Yale Environment 360: Why take your research to France, and was there a moment of no return for you regarding that decision?

Ben Sanderson: First, as I think everybody working in science and people working in other fields after the election, I was initially very concerned about what this would mean for research. Just simply the fear that science was going to be suppressed had an effect, before there were really any top-down changes in the administration at all. Funding agencies, people managing major labs and deciding which proposals should be funded, started to be more cautious about the kind of language they wanted in proposals and about the type of science they wanted in proposals. That effect became very apparent, especially during the first year of the administration, when nobody really knew what was going on.

I wrote a couple of proposals that year and found that there was definitely a nervousness for funding science that had direct societal applications or direct relevance to [CO2] emissions and the consequences of emissions. There was a preference for the kind of project that was purely theoretical, purely physical science, without really thinking about how that connects back to society, both in terms of thinking about [climate change] scenarios and what humanity might do moving forward, and thinking about how climate simulations relate back to impacts and decision-making on the adaptation side. We’ve seen funding institutions and labs pull back from being on the front line of that. That’s not to say that that kind of work isn’t happening at all in the U.S. It is, but people are more nervous about highlighting it and funding it further.

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https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-this-us-climate-scientist-is-leaving-trump-america-for-france-sanderson

[Ilsa]

1. And the drain of scientists and innovators continues. nt

[hatrack]

2. Nations can survive lots of things - war, disease, occupation, natural disasters

One thing they can never survive is the willing embrace of ignorance and stupidity.

[Yonnie3]

3. A relative "retired" from NCAR in 2013

His status became emeritus. He finished up in process research and did peer reviews through 2017. In 2018 there is nothing coming to him from NCAR. I'm guessing that the quote marks can come off the retired.