Trump Pulls US Out of Key Global Climate Assessment Ahead of Meeting in China

The US will not attend a key meeting in China this week, where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the world’s most authoritative scientific body on the subject – is set to approve the outline of its upcoming report.

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The Trump administration has pulled the US out of global discussions about an upcoming key UN climate change assessment, according to media reports.

US State Department officials won’t take part in this week’s meeting in Hangzhou, China, where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is set to agree on the outlines, timelines, and budget of its upcoming reports – the Seventh Assessment Report and the Methodology Report on Carbon Dioxide Removal Technologies, Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage.

Sources told various media late last week that the State Department delegation’s travel plans had been denied. President Trump also ordered federal scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the US Global Change Research Program to stop work on all other IPCC climate assessment-related activities, a NASA spokesperson told CNN.

Johan Rockström, an internationally acclaimed Earth scientist and Director of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said the move was “another irresponsible self-destructive US behaviour” that “will damage US science and society.”

The move is part of the new administration’s broader anti-climate agenda, which saw, among others, the US’s withdrawal the Paris Agreement. 196 countries signed the treaty in 2015 with the aim to strengthen the global response to the growing threat of climate change. The US, Iran, Libya, and Yemen are the only countries in the world outside the key climate accord.

Turning Point

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the world’s most authoritative scientific body on the subject, counting 195 member countries and thousands of contributors from around the world. Since its inception in 1988, the UN body has provides policymakers with regular scientific assessments on the climate crisis, its future impacts, as well as adaptation and mitigation recommendations.

The 'Hockey stick' graph from the IPCC's third report. — The ‘Hockey stick’ graph from the IPCC’s third report. Image: IPCC AR3 Working Group I (2001).

A turning point in climate science came in 2001, when the IPCC featured the popular “hockey stick” graph in its Third Assessment Report. The graph illustrates the changes in global temperatures of the past millennium that revealed an unprecedented, sharp upward trajectory towards the end of the 1990s and into the new century – the “blade” of the hockey stick.

While the graph does not specifically attribute this increase to fossil fuel emissions, it aligns with the broader scientific consensus that human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels, have been a primary driver of the observed global warming trend.

The group was awarded the Nobel Piece Prize in 2007 “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

‘Final Warning’

The IPCC’s latest report, released in 2022, concluded that planet is “more likely than not” to reach a 1.5C rise since pre-industrial levels in the near term, resulting in “increasingly irreversible losses.” The group said human activities have “unequivocally” caused global warming, leading to the highest concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in at least 2 million years and a 1.2C rise in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels.

“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” the report read.

A survey of 380 IPCC scientists conducted by the Guardian last May revealed that 77% of them believe humanity is headed for at least 2.5C of warming.

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