A US scientist who helped prove the human impact on climate change is moving to the UK as he feels he can “no longer safely” do his work in America under the Trump administration.
Professor Ben Santer, who has spent almost four decades researching the human “fingerprint” on Earth’s climate, is leaving the US after a number of “concerning” incidents, including university funding cuts and calls from industry lobbyists to have him investigated.
“Under the second Trump administration, it’s become increasingly difficult for me to do my job,” Professor Santer told The i Paper.
Over the past year the Trump administration has introduced wide-ranging cuts to climate research programmes, while thousands of officials working at climate and environmental agencies have been laid off.
The US has withdrawn from various international climate pacts, including the landmark Paris Agreement, and the President has called climate change a “scam” and a “hoax”.
Last year the US Department of Energy published a report that downplayed the impact of human-induced climate change and argued that the US cutting its carbon emissions would have an “undetectably small” impact on global warming.
Professor Santer is among a group of scientists who say their research was misrepresented in the report.
“The degree of misrepresentation, was pretty shocking…it claims, without evidence, that we didn’t find a human fingerprint on atmospheric temperature.”
Proving the human ‘fingerprint’ on climate
In the late 1980s Professor Santer worked as part of a team that demonstrated the impact humans were having on the Earth’s changing climate.
In 1995 he authored a chapter of a key report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which concluded “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”.
“That was arguably the first time that the international scientific community spoke with one voice and said, formally, we can see it. We can identify a human caused climate change signal in data, in observations,” he said.
This was the first time Professor Santer experienced a political backlash to his work as he says fossil fuel industry lobbyists and oil-producing states attempted to discredit him and his colleagues.
“Times were pretty rough. I was investigated by Congress. My sources of funding were investigated. There were calls for my dismissal [as a climate researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California],” he said.
Professor Santer’s experience was immortalised in the play Kyoto, which was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2024, and dramatised the negotiations that led to the Kyoto Protocol, the first global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions
“Nothing in my scientific career or training had prepared me for being in the center of the maelstrom,” he said.
Trump targets ‘climate science’
Despite these threats, Professor Santer said the US has “by and large” been a safe place for him to work.
For the past 30 years he has been employed by the federally funded Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
However, he said he started to experience “significant headwinds” during the first Trump administration, including funding cuts that he believes were “politically motivated” and complaints about his behaviour to his bosses from members of the Trump administration.
“If the President of the United States is dismissing your work not only as incorrect but as dishonest, hoax, conspiracy, then that ignorance trickles down to other levels of government,” he said.
The threats ramped up under the second Trump administration, which is trying to “dismantle the entire scientific enterprise of climate science in the United States”, Professor Santer said.
A number of factors contributed to Professor Santer’s decision to leave the US, including concerns about the impact his work would have on his colleagues.
“I didn’t want my US collaborators to experience negative consequences because we were doing this work together. I didn’t want them to have their funding cut. I didn’t want foreign students working at these universities to have visas revoked. And these harms are not hypothetical. We see on a daily basis that they’re real and they happen,” he said.
Another factor is a letter sent to the Attorney General Pam Bondi by fossil fuel lobbyists Power the Future, and reported by Fox News, calling for him to be investigated for his previous work briefing judges on climate change.
“Being brought to the attention of someone like that is concerning, and that was another factor in my decision that I could no longer safely do my work in the United States,” he said.
The UK was a natural choice for Professor Santer as his partner is based here and he is now taking up an honorary professor role at the University of East Anglia, where he studied for his PhD in the 1980s.
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Professor Santer said the scientific community in Europe must stay alert to efforts from the US to “export willful ignorance” to other countries.
“I think it’s critically important for scientists to speak out publicly about the reality and seriousness of climate change in the face of these alternate narratives that it’s a hoax, a con job, a conspiracy,” he said.
“That’s what I’ve tried to do, and will continue to try and do under the second Trump administration. The administration doesn’t get to define what reality is.”
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