It was not easy for Dr. Kevin Trenberth to leave the United States. An esteemed climate scientist who has published more than 600 articles on climatology, Trenberth spent more than four decades of his life in America, first teaching at the University of Illinois before joining the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), where he eventually became a distinguished scholar.
Yet by September 2019, the New Zealand native decided to return home because he’d had enough of America under President Donald Trump. Trenberth has long been a fierce critic of Trump, but now things were impacting him personally.
“I cannot go to NSF [the National Science Foundation] for research funds because NCAR is base funded that way,” Trenberth wrote in a note to himself at the time. “Nor has it been fruitful to garner funds internally, and the external grants, especially with NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] dried up after 2012 when NOAA put forward a proposal for a climate service but thoroughly messed it up, and Lamar Smith [R-Texas, then-chair of the Science Committee in the House] not only killed it but cut research funds for climate by 30%.”
America’s lack of support for climate science poses a serious problem for the survival of our species, according to Trenberth. Because the United States is both a leading world power and major contributor to climate change (along with China, the European Union and the United Kingdom), Trenberth says it must do its part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As human activity dumps carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases and water vapor into the atmosphere, the overheating planet will cause sea levels to rise, hurricanes to become more extreme and droughts and heatwaves to become more frequent and more intense.
"They had a bullseye on us."
It made Trenberth think of Nevil Shute’s 1957 science fiction novel “On the Beach,” in which a nuclear war wiped out the Northern Hemisphere, forcing survivors to flee to southeast Australia and New Zealand. In that fictional scenario, humanity barbecued itself; in reality, Trenberth describes our species’ demise as more of a slow boil. As the temperature rises both figuratively and literally, the question for many scientists is whether they should stay to fight in a nation whose politics make it increasingly hostile to climate science.
By leaving during Trump’s first term, the emeritus Trenberth found one drastic but simple solution to the problem, which was to simply no longer reside in America. Thirtysomething Rose Abramoff, who started as a forest ecologist and also studies climate change, biogeochemistry and land management, arrived at the same conclusion as Trenberth, but with a critical difference: She later came back.
“During the first Trump administration, I was working at a large national laboratory based on the West Coast as a postdoc,” Abramoff recalled, referring to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Alameda, California. When Trump won the presidency, however, Abramoff saw that scientists were self-censoring. It became a professional necessity.
“We, researchers in general, were doing a lot of anticipatory obedience,” Abramoff said. This anticipatory obedience is partially based on memories from Trump’s first term, which other scientists have reported to Salon. An anonymous EPA official who left during Trump’s first term described how a lot of their work “pretty much stalled” during all four years when he was in office. “We kind of had to talk about the work differently,” they explained. “No one used the word ‘climate.’ Everybody kind of just talked about, ‘What are the outcomes of climate work?’ and not necessarily name ‘climate’ just as it is, if that makes sense.”
Those who did not comply, like air pollution expert Dan Costa, found that they “had a bullseye on us,” adding that “people objected when I felt that this administration coming in would number one, go after that regulatory program, and number two, because climate was in there, that it was just going to paper over the whole situation.”
Abramoff experienced a similar demand for anticipatory obedience as she pursued her ecology studies. “In our new proposals we would say things like ‘we study climate variability’ rather than ‘climate science’ or ‘soil health’ rather than ‘climate impacts on the carbon cycle in soil,’ which is my area of study,” Abramoff said.
Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes.
"The Trump years are looming ... The issues relate to how much scientists can pursue things that may not have an immediate payoff, and how well it is all communicated."
When Abramoff saw a Make Our Planet Great Again scholarship subsidized by French President Emmanuel Macron, she thought the name was hilarious and applied; to her delight, she got the job, moving to France from 2018 to 2021, working for the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement. During the COVID-19 pandemic she began to miss her family, however, and eventually decided to move back to the United States. By that time Trump was out of office, having lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, but Abramoff says this was not why she chose to come back.
Yet even though Trump won the 2024 presidential election and will soon return to power, Abramoff does not plan on fleeing this time. She believes she can do more good in this country.
“When I was in France I wasn't as politically effective as I could have been in the United States,” Abramoff said. “I didn't understand the political system as well. I didn't have the same level of connections and understanding of how to make social and political change.”
According to Abramoff, America is where the action is because the United States is the single greatest historical emitter of fossil fuels and the Trump administration is going to “exacerbate our responsibility. The Trump administration is going to make the climate crisis worse, not better. I feel like I have a personal responsibility to stay here and push against that.”
Today Abramoff does this through her work at the Wintergreen Earth Science based in Kennebunk, Maine. Trenberth, by contrast, prefers to stay with his family in New Zealand. Indeed, that was a big reason why — unlike Abramoff — Trenberth ultimately decided to leave America for good.
We need your help to stay independent
“My daughter was born in New Zealand but left at age three,” Trenberth said. “She became quite successful and was a vice president at OppenheimerFunds. She too was upset with Trump and especially the associated misogyny, since she has two daughters, now five and seven years old, my grandchildren. Very courageously, she quit, just before Oppenheimerfunds folded, and found a position in Auckland, New Zealand.”
Between that and America’s gun violence epidemic, which Trenberth blames on poor regulations, the climate scientist felt his best option was to replant himself in New Zealand. At the same time, this does not mean he lacks any hope that things could improve in the country he once called home.
“The funding under the Biden administration was a real shot in the arm, but the Trump years are looming,” Trenberth said. “The issues relate to how much scientists can pursue things that may not have an immediate payoff, and how well it is all communicated.”
Abramoff also urged climate scientists and those who support them to not let themselves be scared into suppressing the truth.
“Don't comply in advance,” Abramoff said. “Don't comply without being asked. Don't censor yourself before you've even been asked to censor yourself. Because I think a lot of regimes that desire to be authoritarians and desire to control public discourse, they use fear to silence us. They don't even necessarily have to lift a finger."
Read more
about climate change
Shares