IDEIAS

 

What happens if access to US climate data becomes more limited? Listen to Jason Mitchell discuss with Professor Benjamin Horton, Director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore, about what the political changes in the US could mean for the international scientific community; how that impact translates into access and availability of critical climate datasets; and why some climate scientists are already thinking about substitutes plans and worst case scenarios.

Recording date: 27 February 2025

Benjamin Horton

Professor Benjamin Horton is Director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). His research concerns sea-level change. He aims to understand the mechanisms that have determined sea-level changes in the past, which will shape changes in the future. Professor Horton has won a number of research awards from European Geosciences Union, American Geophysical Union and Geological Society of America. Ben is an editor for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th Assessment Report.

 

Episode Transcript

Note: This transcription was generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers and may contain errors. As a part of this process, this transcript has also been edited for clarity.

 

Jason Mitchell:

I’m Jason Mitchell, head of Responsible Investment Research at Man Group. You’re listening to A Sustainable Future, a podcast about what we’re doing today to build a more sustainable world tomorrow.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast, and I hope everyone is staying well. So I’m ageing myself here. I know that. But there’s a line in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off that goes, “Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” And look, I realise I’m taking it a little out of context, but follow me on this. Late last year I interviewed former NOAA Chief Scientist Dr. Sarah Kapnick. We talked about the origins of NOAA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency. We talked about its scope, its mission, and its value as a US public good, which was first established under the JFK administration.

But like I said, life is moving pretty fast and we could miss it, especially the things we’ve taken for granted. So this episode flips that perspective. What I’m curious about here is the international public good the US has created over the last 75 years. And I’m specifically interested in understanding just how important US scientific expertise, resources, institutional support, data, and funding are to the international scientific community. Is there an argument to say that there’s a lot of free riders around this? Probably. But the big question is what substitutes and next best options exist that can try to fill the gaps if that public good disappears? And spoiler, there aren’t many and they all have their own drawbacks.

So this episode is as much about raising awareness as it is trying to frame what’s at stake, which is the criticality of US scientific contribution to the global system. And that’s going to reverberate across the world of finance and its efforts to understand and price things like climate risk. So yeah, the stakes are kind of high. And like I said, life is moving pretty fast and we could miss things we’ve taken for granted, which is why it’s great to have Professor Benjamin Horton on the podcast. We talk about what the political changes in the US could mean for the international scientific community, how that impact translates into access and availability of critical climate data sets, and why some climate scientists are already thinking about substitute plants and worst case scenarios.

Ben’s a director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore at Nanyang Technological University, his research concerns sea level change. He aims to understand the mechanisms that have determined sea level changes in the past, which will shape changes in the future. Ben’s won a number of research awards from European Geosciences Union, American Geophysical Union and Geological Society of America. Ben’s also an editor of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, the sixth assessment report.

Welcome to the podcast, Professor Benjamin Horton. It’s great to have you here, and thank you for taking the time today.

Benjamin Horton:

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to this conversation and hopefully, I can be insightful to your listeners.

Jason Mitchell:

I definitely think you will. So I’m looking forward to this. So maybe we start with some scene setting here. Can you describe the picture you’re seeing in terms of climate resources, either effectively or potentially… I don’t know what other word to use, but potentially disappearing? I’ve tried to keep track of some. The US Department of Defence Climate website is now down, so are parts of the USDA. The White House climate site is down. FEWS.net, the Famine Early Warning System, which was funded by USAID, which provides analysis on food security is also offline. So I guess maybe can you contextualise what you see as a climate scientist happening right now?

Benjamin Horton:

Well, I think that’s a question I never thought I would be asked, or if you did ask it, I would give a very different question. So if we were doing this podcast last year or any year in the past 30 years that I’ve been a climate scientist, what I’d talk to you about is, “Well, we need to get more data from the developing south. That’s where we have the gaps temporarily and also spatially.” And without that data, we’re unable to make the accurate projections of climate change and their impacts, which we can do in North America or Europe. But we have an inability to do that, let’s say where I’m working in Southeast Asia. So that would’ve been my answer for 30 years.

But now in February 2025, it’s a completely different ballgame. I am, and I think that many climate scientists are a little bit reeling here. We’re in a little bit of a state of shock. We have always relied on the US science irrespective of a political party in always leading climate science, always adhering to the freedom of science and the freedom of information. One of the reasons why climate science is led by scientists in the United States is there’s just a plethora of very, very accurate data, which enables you to look at processes, impacts, adaptations and mitigations. And that simply isn’t the case now. We are now worried about data, we’re worried about personnel, we’re worried about international agreements. And when you’re dealing with a topic such as climate, you can’t just rely on a data set from one region. You have to have data from all over the globe because everything is linked, our atmospheres, our oceans, and our ice. You can’t just use one group of scientists because everyone has different areas of expertise, and you can’t only look at one different types of impacts because every region is impacted differently.

So it’s very, very unsettling. And it goes along a pathway that climate scientists have been increasingly worried about what’s happening to our world. I mean, in 2023 and 2024, we just started breaking records on climate again and again. We crossed the threshold that climate scientists said that we could not cross, which is that our global average temperatures would get beyond 1.5 degrees sea warming above pre-industrial. So, we had all of that. We had a conference of parties where we had the infiltration of the oil industry. We had record-breaking carbon dioxide emissions, and then we had horrific impacts just hitting us again and again. And perhaps the most recently is the forest fires in L.A.

So on the back of that, we now have in the spring of 2025, a problem we never thought we’d have, which is the lack of data or the independence or the lack of political influence on our climate science in the United States. So if you want to think about any particular website, well, of course there are, and the removal of data associated with climate is exceedingly worrying. But then when you have programmes by the National Science Foundation that are being blocked if they have the word climate in them, I mean, that’s just something that… Well, I never thought would ever happen.

Jason Mitchell:

Yeah, we’re definitely going to get into some of that stuff, and that was a great overview. But I guess it leads on to this natural question, what is at stake from the perspective of the international science community? And maybe can you talk about just how much dependency is there on US weather data and climate modelling?

Benjamin Horton:

Okay. Well, I think it’s paramount to all fields of climate science, but I suppose it’s easier to talk about what I do. So I study sea level rise. And if you want to get data of the observations of sea level, you go to NOAA. And NOAA have countless international agreements with virtually every country in the world, which have taken probably decades to set up, built upon decades of trust, where countries give their data of sea level, which comes traditionally from tide gauges. So tide gauges are instrumentation set up at tidal ports. They measure high and low tide six minutes, but the average of that is the average sea level of a day. The average of every day in the year is the average sea level of the year. And then they are your observations that you look at trends and look at processes over annual, decadal. And in certain cases, we have records going back over a century. So there’ve been these agreements where countries provide all the data to NOAA, NOAA process all that data, quality check it, make sure there’s no shifts or gaps temporarily or spatially in the data, and then make that freely available to the climate science community.

So for example, if I want to get the data on sea level rise in Singapore, I don’t go to the Maritime Port Authority in Singapore, I go to NOAA. Because the Maritime Port Authority gives their data based upon an international agreement between NOAA and the Maritime Port Authority in Singapore. They give their data to NOAA, NOAA process it, and then re-release it to the world. So if NOAA’s data goes down, or if the agreements between NOAA and other international countries stops, the data is unavailable or it’s not up-to-date, and therefore I cannot do my analysis, my students can’t do their analysis, and Singapore can’t do sea level projections to better project its coastlines. That’s how serious it is. And I think it’s the data, it’s the trust and it’s these international agreements.

I’m very aware of how long they take. I’m the director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore. The middle word in that is observatory. So we collect observations around Southeast Asia. As I said earlier, this is a region where we have huge gaps, temporally and spatially, and we’re funded to fill those gaps. Now, if we want to collect data from Singapore, obviously we can go to the Singaporean government. But if we want to collect data from Indonesia or the Philippines, this takes many, many years of dealing with governments and agencies in that country to allow them for us to either go in there and collect our own data or get data from them and process it. And it takes years of trust. And I know that if I suddenly said, “You could not have access to this data,” to our Indonesian colleagues, immediately, they would just stop all of our agreement. So that’s the seriousness, which perhaps users don’t understand that it’s based around trust and it’s based around agreement. And if these start to collapse, they will take decades, if ever, to be realigned.

Jason Mitchell:

It’s interesting. I had the former chief scientist of NOAA on several months ago, and we talked about NOAA being obviously just a powerful public good in a US context, but it obviously sounds like it’s a global public good as well.

Benjamin Horton:

Yeah, it is. There’s just certain elements. The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, they’ve had decades of funding going into looking at our oceans. I mean, the US has been an academic powerhouse or scientific powerhouse, especially since World War II. It had the economic might out of World War II. And you can always govern or think of the impact that a country has on the world by scientific exploration. If you just go back through the history of oceanography and the science behind it, our understanding of the oceans was driven first of all by the Portuguese and the Spanish because they were associated with Magellan and trans-global connections between the seven oceans. Then the British dominated, and this coincided with our first measurements of the depths of our oceans. And then the US dominated it. They’re the ones who did the first understanding of plate tectonics in our oceans, started the Deep Sea Drilling Programme, primarily driven through military and industrial expertise, but it led to amazing science discoveries.

And so the US has led in science for decades now. Other countries have come to the fore. We’ve seen this expansion of Chinese science and Chinese coming in to try to solve some of maybe the lack of finances that the US may have. We’ve also seen the Middle East now try to prop up or try to contribute to a lot of the climate objectives. But a lot of these data sets are built upon decades of expertise from the United States, be it in the oceans, be it in the atmosphere, or be it on our ice sheets. So basically, three spheres that we’re really, really interested when we think about climate.

Jason Mitchell:

Yeah, absolutely. I always point out that the US Landsat satellite network has been going on since 1972. I mean, you’ve got an immense amount… More than 50 years of data.

Benjamin Horton:

Exactly. And that’s also the key on climate change. You can say, “Well, okay, we’ll start another agreement and we’ll all collect the data now.” That’s great if you want to collect data in 2025. But if you want to identify… It’s called climate change for a reason. You’ve got to see the change, and the only way in the change is to go back through time. So those historical data sets are so key for identifying change.

Jason Mitchell:

This is really interesting. What does this all mean for international climate initiatives and efforts? I’m asking this specifically because you’re quoted in a recent Bloomberg article week saying that… Your quote, “Without the US, the IPCC fails.” What does that mean?

Benjamin Horton:

Well, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change… So I’ve obviously been involved in it, as you said in my bio, I was involved in the sixth assessment as a review editor, and I was involved in the fifth assessment as a chapter lead author. So I’ve been involved in it for quite a long time. And it’s based around international agreements. It’s based around understanding, the IPCC’s remit is to identify the physical state of the climate, and that involves looking at data. And then the next remit is to see or conclude how responsible human activity is. So again, that involves data. And the funding for the IPCC has been somewhere in the order of 33 to 50% from the US in terms of setting up of the IPCC and making sure that these meetings happen seamlessly and that you have a variety of support officers being paid.

But perhaps most importantly, the observations we’ve already talked about, the experts in climate science. If I think about this right now, when I was the review editor… I was the review editor for a C-level chapter. Okay, so maybe there were about 20 authors. Well, 10 of them were either Americans or based in the United States. So you’re losing a huge amount of expertise. Although the IPCC has always strived to increase the diversity of scientists that are on the panel, the expertise quite simply… Because let’s say the National Science Foundation puts more money into climate science than the rest of the countries in the world combined, you’re going to have more experts from the US.

The other point is the projections of climate. So again, if you go to my discipline, sea level rise, the projections of sea level rise that are used by the IPCC are from NASA. They’re not from anywhere else. They’re from NASA. So NASA, in the six assessment report provided the funding to produce projections for the planet. They had the funding, they employed the personnel, they gave the money for the modelling, the CPUs, the times on the server, and they produce the projections. So when I say the IPCC will fail, it’s because, well, you won’t have the data, you won’t have the personnel, you won’t have the financial support, and you won’t have the projections. So if you don’t have all of those, I don’t actually see how in its current state it can continue. There can be substitutes for that, but there’ll be certain areas where they cannot substitute, or if they do, it isn’t of as high a quality. So if the IPCC tries to produce the seventh assessment like the sixth assessment, it will have gaps in it and it won’t be as high a quality.

Jason Mitchell:

Interesting. Let’s put a pin on the substitutes for one second. I want to go back to that article. That article basically said that Dr. Kate Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate advisor, was scheduled to co-chair the IPCC discussion in Hangzhou, China, but apparently is now prohibited because of a stop work order issued to US scientists working on the report. I’ve heard, independent of that, anecdotally, that NASA, which currently chairs the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites, or CEOS, their working group on climate is also limiting its participation. If NOAA and NASA scientists are no longer allowed to work with the international community, how would that impact the face of scientific development outside of just IPCC, especially on climate, whether it’s understanding sea level risk, your area, climate model development or future extreme weather impacts?

Benjamin Horton:

I’ve worked with US federal employees many times for many years. I was based in the US for 15 years. So I knew about always trying to attract federal workers to meetings that I was at or attract federal workers to participate in projects, particularly international ones. And obviously, federal employees have to ask for permission. They do not have, let’s say, the academic freedom that someone at a independent university has. So if you’re a professor like myself, as long as you have the grant income and you have within the grant saying that you will go to an international conference or you’ll perform international analyses, then you’re just allowed to do it. You don’t have to ask permission. So if I’m going abroad, I don’t have to ask permission of the founder or the president of the university. So federal employees have always been subject to that. But if you are involved in climate science and there’s an IPCC meeting, then you would assume that they would be allowed to go.

And all I think about is that if in the sixth assessment, so the chair of the sixth assessment on C-level was an American federal scientist, and if he had been unable to go, that chapter would’ve collapsed because he was using his expertise. And as I’ve just said, the NASA funding that was available and the NASA models to project sea level. So we would not have been able to do the remit of providing projections of sea level for every coastal city on the planet. And so that’s my thoughts about climate science, and I would say it’s probably pervasive in all areas where the US provides the initiative or leads on science.

Going back to your original question, it’s just something I never really thought about, but has always been an advantage of the United States. So I’ll give you another example. Here we have a programme… I supervised a graduate student on a funded programme in Singapore to look at the risks associated with climate, financial risk and health risks. So the team involved myself, a Singaporean business studies academic and a Singaporean Hong Kong health professional. And the data we used, we didn’t look at the impacts of climate on risk in Southeast Asia or Singapore or Hong Kong. We didn’t look at the health impacts of climate change in Hong Kong or Singapore. We used the US because the US had the data, it was freely available. We knew the climate risks, and we looked at the Mississippi Valley and flooding and looking at the risks of that, because we had all the physical risks and we had the financial costs. And then when we were looking at air pollution, we looked at the air pollution in Detroit. We didn’t look at the air pollution in Hong Kong because we didn’t have the data and we didn’t have the hospital emissions.

So there’s always been this freedom of information, which means that scientists all around the world go to the US for the analysis. And then what does the US get out of that? Well, obviously it gets some sort of soft geopolitical capital about it, but it gets the best science in the world being done in the United States. Again, for sea level rise, if I think about my subject, one of the things that the US has that other countries don’t have is freely available information on the height of the land. And you may say, “What’s that about?” Well, that’s really important if you’re going to think about sea level rise. If you know how high sea level is rising, you need to know the height of the land. And in most countries of the world, that is either politically sensitive data or has not been collected at the accuracy needed, but it is in the United States. So if we want to look at the impacts of let’s say a collapsing ice sheet, where do we look? We look at the impacts in Philadelphia or in Florida or in San Francisco or LA. These are all the things that you take for granted, which maybe we shouldn’t do anymore.

Jason Mitchell:

That’s really interesting. I also wanted to ask… You recently raised the alarm bell regarding the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s global monitoring lab. Although, to be fair, it looks like the site was under repair and it’s still up. But how much NOAA data do you use? If NOAA stops sharing its data globally or its data suddenly becomes hard to access, what would happen? What are the global consequences? I’m trying to think of some kind of an example. Australia recently stopped producing El Nino Southern Oscillation, or ENSO forecasts. Although, they still make seasonal forecasts for temperature and precipitation. But that means that more people now rely on the NOAA forecasts for El Nino and La Nina, both of which obviously have big implications on global markets.

Benjamin Horton:

Well, I mean, they’re huge drivers to the Australians. Let’s not live in a bubble on this. As I said, the data that has been collected over decades, if that’s not accessible, you can’t work out changes, and then you can’t work out anomalies and then you can’t work out projections. And if there’s one thing we’ve become very, very aware about climate change, it’s not a projection for the end of the 21st century, is it now? We are being hit by extreme weather again and again. Now, if you talk about websites that are going down and going back up, well, okay, so the data is there. There are personnel still working in these federal organisations that are making sure that the data is still available. But with mass redundancies, you could think about how are they going to be updated? And these redundancies seem to have, based upon the information that we get out of the media, they don’t have anything really to do with skills. It’s just the ability to remove a personnel. So you could find that critical data isn’t being updated.

But I think that the test or the… What would you say? The canary in the coal mine will be when the next disaster hits the United States, will that data be made available? So let’s say there is a land falling category five hurricane coming into Florida. Will the projections for that be made freely available? Will the severity of that be freely available? In the aftermath will the water level height be made freely available? If there’s another, which there will be another forest fire again, will that data be made available to enable people to evacuate? You would really, really hope so. But just as importantly, in the aftermath, trying to work out who was responsible for it and the attribution of climate to it. That’s going to be the test for me. Because if we’re lacking a month’s data, let’s say in sea level… So let’s say we can’t access February’s data in sea level. Well, that’s not a particular game changer in the science of sea level. If we don’t have the data for the whole of 2025, that’s going to cause problems. But if there was a catastrophic event in sea level, if we think about abrupt events, let’s say there is a tsunami. So NOAA is also responsible for Pacific tsunami warnings.

So that is obviously a huge investment in dollars in the United States, a huge amount of technical expertise. And tsunami warnings from the Pacific Ring of Fire not only hit the US coastline, they hit all the coastlines of the Pacific Rim. So that sort of information needs to be available, obviously in real time. Freely available to all countries, irrespective of whether they support the US on DEI or transgender or anything. And so that is going to be the test, I feel. And if it doesn’t happen, what is the reason for that? Is that a lack of funding? Is it a lack of personnel or is it something political? And I think that that is the worry for scientists.

In climate science we can continue to do our work based upon the data that is collected. And the longer we’re left with holes or gaps in it, the worse our science will become. But it’s these extreme events… And you can talk about El Nino southern oscillation projections on rainfall or temperature, but we also can think about abrupt events, tropical cyclones, floods, heat waves, wildfires. And then the other one that I’ve not really seen touched upon, because tsunamis are obviously not related to climate, but the impacts of tsunamis will hit all nations. And obviously, if we want to get into DEI, it will hit the people of minorities or people of low socio-economic groups far, far worse than those of a higher socio-economic group, obviously.

Jason Mitchell:

Let’s talk about the redundancies in climate data. What’s the next best solution if US data becomes harder to access? I’ll be honest, I’m less versed on sea level rise data sets, but I think maybe the satellite networks provide a useful analogy. The EU’s Copernicus satellite network looks like a viable substitute to the US Landsat network of satellites. It goes to 10 metre resolution versus Landsat’s 30-metre resolution, which is obviously pretty impressive. But the time series is a problem, right? I mean, Copernicus only goes back to 2014 versus the US Landsat to 1972.

Benjamin Horton:

There’s no answer to this because all these data sets are collected through international collaborations that have existed for decades. In sea level, as I said, NOAA is the main house of sea level data. But the British… If we go back to their dominance around the world at the beginning of the 20th century and the end of the 19th century, well, they had the British Admiralty who used to collect tidal data around the planet. So there’s still vestiges of that expertise within the UK, but it cannot substitute for the expertise of NOAA. I mean, we have existed in a world where there’s obviously been isolation of certain countries. So for example, getting data out of China has always been very, very difficult. And data out of [inaudible 00:29:51] Soviet Union has been very, very difficult. And since the start of the Ukraine war, you can see analogies.

Polar science has incredibly suffered because of the Ukraine war, because you used to have the Arctic Council. I mean a crazy thing, but Singapore is an observer state on the Arctic Council, really quite weird. The other members of the Arctic Council have coastlines or parts of their landmass within the Arctic Circle. And then you have Singapore that has an observer status. When I moved from the United States to Singapore, I thought all my polar science was gone, and then I come here and find out it’s got an observer status, and then they want me to be involved. And I’m going, “What?” And then you go, “Yeah, okay, I’ll be involved.” And I went to meetings in St. Petersburg as part of that, the Arctic Council. I went to a meeting in Norway. I went to a meeting in Iceland, and I went to a meeting in St. Petersburg. And there, you’ve got Russian and American and European scientists and Asian scientists all working together on trying to understand how the warmest place on the planet or the fastest warmest place on the planet, which is the Arctic, globally temperatures have gone up around 1.5 degrees C, but in the Arctic, they’ve gone up around four and a half degrees C. So all the scientists, irrespective of their nationality, are all working on a common theme trying to understand how rapidly it’s changing and why.

And then the Ukraine war happens and it all stops. But we never thought that would happen with the US because for decades or as long as probably any scientist can ever imagine, there’s always been collaboration between US scientists and European and other democracies. And that has stopped. So saying you’re going to find a substitute is I think, impossible, because in Arctic science, there has been no substitute. How are we supposed to get data from Arctic Russia right now? We can’t. We have no idea what’s happening there. No idea. And so all our science is partial. And when you know that climate is part of the earth, and the Earth has got seven oceans and we’re all interconnected, it doesn’t work like that, does it? So, it’s not an easy solution.

As I said, you can maybe say, “Okay, going forward, we’re going to not rely on the United States.” Well, how do you move forward? Does that mean that we don’t collect any data from Continental, the United States? How’s that going to work? If you want to think about understanding climate, well, the main system that drives the temperature planet Earth is the Atlantic Meridional overturning circulation. It takes warm motion water from the tropics to the poles, and it’s existed for thousands upon thousands of years. It’s the reason our civilization has existed, because we have a stable climate. But that circulation in geological past has changed and caused dramatic changes to the climate. Well, where do you study the Atlantic Meridional overturning circulation? I was going to say the Gulf of Mexico. I should change that, shouldn’t I? In the Gulf of America around the tip of Florida. It’s called the Gulf Stream. Benjamin Franklin identified it in the 1650s. Benjamin Franklin gave that data to postmaster generals in Europe and North America freely to make sure that postal ships could use the current to get quicker from North America to Europe and not be held up by it when going back from Europe to North America.

Jason Mitchell:

That’s super interesting. One of my questions though is, it’s either substitutes or it’s next best options. And one of our climate scientists who used to work at the GFDL, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab mentioned this. But to what degree does the Earth System Grid Federation, the ESGF, provide some kind of climate data hedge in this sense? Or do we need to create an international repository or a decentralised system to store critical climate data to ensure long-term accessibility throughout political electoral cycles?

Benjamin Horton:

Well, I think obviously your last statement is true. Hindsight is 20/20, isn’t it? So maybe we should have thought about this, that you could have the whims of politics or regional wars. Again, I always try and think of that have happened. So again, let’s go back to sea level data. So some of the longest records of sea level that we have archived and therefore have been transcribed digitally are found in Europe and North America. They are regions that have been geopolitically stable. This data, even with World War II or World War I was never removed or destroyed. So you can have archives of sea level, let’s say in Amsterdam that go back 300 years, or in Stockholm, go back 200 years, or in New York City, go back to the 1820s.

But here in Singapore, our record of sea level in Singapore only really exists post 1960. Before that, Singapore’s been a port for, I don’t know, at least since the 1800s. And the data was available, but it was destroyed or lost in World War II. So it was destroyed and lost, and it’s never, ever been recovered. And then it was controlled by Malaysia, then it had an independence. And really, only after it became independent and it started to think about scientific framework, did it start to collect the data. So even though we can say this is very unusual, there are examples in different countries where the data has been lost, and therefore, maybe we should have learned the lesson, that there should have been more international agreements. You can use perhaps examples such as the Antarctic Treaty, because in Antarctica, no one country has sovereignty to that through the United Nations and the Antarctic Treaty, which I think is up for renewal in 2041. All countries there work freely and exchange data irrespective of their geopolitics or irrespective of, let’s say the Ukraine war or what’s happening in Gaza, the data is still freely available.

So maybe the Antarctic Treaty is an example of where countries can work together independent of politics. But again, is that now going to change? Because Antarctica is… The biggest amount of funding in polar programmes… Again, it’s by the National Science Foundation. It’s incredibly expensive for NSF, and the costs just keep on increasing. But it’s increasingly important to study that region. When grants are looked at an appropriation of grants through the National Science Foundation, obviously everything in terms of Antarctica, there certainly hasn’t been any thought about mineral resources there at all. There isn’t much landmass exposed to do that. Obviously, it’s ice sheets and ice shelves and then deep water. So there’s never been any mineral exploration. So it’s all about the environment and it’s all about climate change. So I would’ve thought… And I’ve not spoken to anybody, but I would’ve thought that Antarctic research will be very, very worried about whether it’s on the chopping block.

And so if that goes, who’s going to take up the slack? So when you think about substitutes or you think about creating repositories, that costs millions and millions and billions of dollars, and who is going to do that? So if I think about some of the areas of science that I know… One of the areas, and I mentioned it previously, is the Deep Sea Drilling Programme. So the Deep Sea Drilling Programme began after World War II. It had an element to do with military expertise. It had an element obviously, to do with petroleum extraction. But the geological community used it for understanding the deep earth. It enabled us to understand phenomena like plate tectonics, that the earth wasn’t rigid, that these plates were moving around, and that enabled us to understand mountain building, earthquakes and volcanoes. So the Deep Sea Drilling Programme for some 30 years, irrespective of which scientists were on the ship, was 100% funded by the Americans. But then the Deep Sea Drilling Programme became the International Drilling Programme where 50% of the funding was still by the United States, and then other countries chipped in for that. So if you then remove the United States completely from that, then those international countries are going to have to chip in even further.

And if we try and think about NATO as an example, we know that it’s very difficult for countries to find the additional money. So if you’re thinking about science, who is going to come to the rescue of that? Well, in many cases, this has been the Chinese, and that’s fantastic for the scientific community, but we’ve always been concerned, and perhaps understandably so, about freedom of information from China. And then with regards to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there’s been this thought that Middle Eastern countries would come in to save the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But then we have a conflict of interest like we’ve had at all the COP meetings where you have a petro-state funding something on climate change. And so it’s not easy. We always admired US science because of freedom of science, and therefore, we just had this guarantee. And maybe now we need to think of things differently, much differently. But we can’t keep doing things the same. You can’t just say, “Well, okay, we’ll take the money off Middle Eastern countries on climate,” and think everything’s going to be fine.

Jason Mitchell:

So the message is, with the US National Science Foundation, looking at a 50% potential budget cut and NOAA looking at potentially a 30 to 50% funding cut and staffing cut, you don’t see a potential replacement, either a government filling that gap? Probably foundations are probably too small to do that.

Benjamin Horton:

Well, yeah. I mean, the thing about it is that who would you go to? You would say, obviously, you would go to the United Nations, but obviously we’ve seen that the United Nations is quite weak at the moment. But that was where you would go to. Philanthropic foundations, potentially. But my knowledge of philanthropic foundations where they like to give funding is where, understandably, they get bang for their bucks. They get action. They don’t particularly like funding upstream science. We’ve always struggled that. As physical scientists, yes, we can get philanthropic funding for scholarships, which is about educating students, or the like to build a building or the like to build a lab, but upstream science and data collection is very, very difficult. Indeed, data collection or data repositories is very, very hard to fund on grants anyhow. It’s very difficult to write to a government.

So let’s say these grants or these data are housed by federal organisations because independent scientists… If you pick one of the big universities in the United States, let’s say you thought about Lamont-Doherty in terms of climate at Columbia University, and you had one of their leading scientists write a grant application, irrespective of the politics, but write a grant application to NASA or to NSF saying, “I want to collect some data,” it would just be thrown out because they’d want to know, “What are you going to test? What are going to be the products?” And all you’re trying to do is just collect and house data. It’s always been very difficult.

Again, I come back to myself, we very much rely at the Earth Observatory of Singapore on block funding from the government to collect the data around the region. How we will use it, we do not know. We’re just collecting the data. Our data is baseline data. So if we’re collecting data on earthquakes or volcanoes, it’s baseline data to compare with when an eruption is going to happen. But the data that’s being collected perhaps isn’t that interestingly scientifically at the moment, but it’s absolutely priceless. So you think about where you can have international organisations, and obviously the United Nations is one of those, but that has been significantly weakened. Philanthropically, potentially. Bloomberg thought about propping up meetings at COP, but that’s a short-term solution and I don’t see that they’re going for that. Private, Well, no.

Again, I know examples of that. The reinsurance industry would love to have the data that we have. They would love it. I mean, we have had big reinsurance firms come into the Earth Observatory periodically offering us millions upon millions of dollars for our data. That’s because they want ownership of it, and they will want to sell it.

Jason Mitchell:

What I’d say is maybe let’s put a pin in that. I definitely want to come back to where the ownership moves to, where the appropriate ownership is. But let me ask you this, if you take a step back against everything we’ve talked about up to this point, what’s the silver lining in all of this, if one exists?This has become one of my standard questions in a number of these episodes over the last half year.

Benjamin Horton:

Well, I think in some ways there is a silver lining in climate because if we think… Again, we’ll go back to what I know. If we think about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, what was its ultimate objective? The ultimate objective was for policy change on climate. What does policy change mean? Well, that means the lowering of the amount of carbon dioxide put into our atmosphere. But the IPCC has been going since 1990. It’s had six reports. If we think of the conference of parties, the conference of parties has been going every single year since 1995. If the mission, which it is, of the conference of parties is to reduce the amount of dangerous greenhouse gases, it has been a colossal failure.

So the IPCC and COP, it’s had many, many positives about bringing people together, and a lot of people are actively interested, dedicated our time. Our understanding of climate is phenomenal. Our advancement in green technology has been great, and the international agreements and nature-based climate solutions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, have all been fantastic. But if you actually step back and say, “Well, what was the mission?” The mission is to reduce greenhouse and gas emissions. And despite all the science and all the meetings of parties that are interested in it, it has been a failure. Well, the worst thing you can do… It’s a definition of insanity, isn’t it? To keep on doing the same thing again and again and expect different results. So the silver lining is that we may be forced to change how we’re going to think about climate action, climate adaptation.

And then the other silver lining… When the climate was first a problem, it was always about mitigation. All we wanted to talk about was shift it into renewable, save nature, and we’ll lower our carbon dioxide. And we hardly ever talked about adaptation because we weren’t willing to let people off the hook of continuing emitting. We’re going to say, “Yeah, we’re not going to talk about adaptation work,” but now we talk about adaptation. So now because of the Trump administration, and then we’ve had the lowering of ESG goals in Europe, and then you had BP rolling back on… You’ve got to think, well, climate change is happening now and there’s not a lot we can do about it. Climate change is happening. It’s all about the severity, but we need to adapt. And then the next thing that we need to think about, which hasn’t been thought about, is geoengineering. Because we’ve got to try and think about, we’re going to get into very, very dangerous amounts of carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere. So we’re going to have to think about how do we cool our earth, or how do we remove that carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?

So the silver linings are that it may make these international organisations think again. They have to think again because they’re forced into it because they don’t have the personnel or the technology or the funding. And then it also may make us think, well, the Trump administration has clearly forced the world to be perhaps a little bit more honest rather than greenwashing. I mean, the Biden administration, the Inflation Reduction Action Act, fantastic, but it did increase the amount of petroleum being produced during his administration. Maybe ironically, you could have some more honest figures on production of petroleum because people aren’t scared to say what they’re doing.

Jason Mitchell:

Got it. Let me wrap up with one last question, and this revisits this point around private sector and the role around climate data. But who do you think the best owner of climate data and climate models is? How do you think about the role of the private sector when it comes to all this information? There’s certainly an apolitical interest from sectors like insurance and investors who care about pricing and hedging climate risk. At the same time, I would say some academics, professor Madison Condon from Boston University, who was on this podcast last year, have raised the alarm about the emergence of… She called it a climate industrial complex where the private sector owns climate services potentially under very opaque conditions. So no longer are we looking at a public good.

Benjamin Horton:

Well, I mean, I think academia runs on peer review. We are based around integrity. That’s what our whole career is about. You talked about the awards I got. Those awards based around being quite a good scientist, but I wouldn’t have got any of those awards if I’d had any element of having a lack of integrity. So you can make mistakes in science. Of course you do, but you never falsify your data. You make your data freely available. The whole scientific hypothesis is all about providing a test for other people to follow. So you write your academic paper, you clearly describe your methodology. Your methodology has to be reproducible. Then you have your results. Your results have to be robust, and people should be able to test us. And through deductive methodology, that’s how science improves.

So scientists are the custodians of data. They may not be, and they’re certainly not the best people for action or communication, because academics, their career, their progression is writing papers, and they take a long, long time to produce. If you want to have a group of farmers in Africa who need to know about how precipitation is changing so they can plant the right crops, well, I wouldn’t go to an academic because he’d want to study it for three or four years. Then he’d write the paper, it’d go through peer review another year, and then they’d come out with a hypothesis, which other scientists would test for years and years until they came out with some grand statement on it. So, we’re good custodians of the data.

I’ve always thought that academics aren’t the greatest, especially as some of the best minds are young people. And young people, when you get your PhD, you have to write papers to become an assistant professor. When you’re an assistant professor, you need to get tenures. Having impact or communicating your science does not get you any of those. So what I would say is that there has to be good public-private partnerships. The worry about the private sector is data quality. Do they have vested interests and are they going to sell to the highest bidder? One of the aspects that NOAA or NASA is all about…. NASA has the sea level tool, which provides projections for people in New York City or provides projections for small coastal cities in rural Africa. It makes no distinction in terms of the quality of that data. So you would never want it to be available to the highest bidder.

Having said that, the advantage of the private sector is that they have an incredibly quick turnaround. So when you’re a professor, you have graduate students, and commonly, you want your graduate students to follow in your footsteps and become professors. But many of them then go into the private sector. And we obviously still talk. And so when I meet people in the private sector, particularly my students, I’m just astounded [inaudible 00:51:37] my students at all the projects that they’re doing. So I met one of my students, and he was looking… I said, “Oh, so what are you working on?” And he said, “Oh, well, you know that boat that went down in the Mediterranean to do with the downdraft, and that rich business man lost his life?” I went, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.” “I worked on that.” And I said, “Oh, how long did you spend on that?” He said, “Oh, about a month.” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” So we just put all the data together, and then we just worked out the likelihood of these events happening in the future. And I said, “How long did that take yet?” “A month.” And I was thinking, “Whoa, if you’d asked me, that would’ve been a three-year project.”

So the advantage of the private sector is the timescale. The advantage of the public sector is data integrity. And so if you can combine them both, you’d have the best of both worlds.

Jason Mitchell:

Got it. Perfect. Perfect. It’s been fascinating to talk about what the political changes in the US could mean for the international scientific community, how that impact translates into access and availability of critical climate data sets, and why some climate scientists are already thinking about substitutes and worst case scenarios. So I’d really like to thank you for your time and insights. I’m Jason Mitchell, the head of Responsible Investment Research at Man Group, here today with Professor Benjamin Horton, director of the Earth Observatory, Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. Many thanks for joining us on A Sustainable Future, and I hope you’ll join us on our next podcast episode. Ben, thanks. This has been a great conversation.

Benjamin Horton:

Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you.

Jason Mitchell:

I’m Jason Mitchell. Thanks for joining us. Special thanks to our guests, and of course, everyone that helped produce this show. To check out more episodes of this podcast, please visit us at man.com/RI-podcast.

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