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UK scientists call on Prime Minister to influence Trump on climate

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A hundred UK climate scientists have signed a letter to the Prime Minister, Theresa May, urging her to press US President-Elect Donald Trump to address climate change.

Prof Piers Forster, director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds, is quoted in The Guardian today (16.01.17), saying, “What concerns me is that if we don’t have good scientific data and observations coming from America, we’ll be flying blind.”

His concerns are shared by directors of other leading climate research centres: Prof Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, Prof Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and Prof Jim Hall, director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University are all signatories to the letter, as are other senior climate scientists at Leeds.

All signed the letter in a personal capacity.

The letter, published on the website of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the LSE,  states that the UK science community will support US researchers in “resisting any political attempts to prevent, hamper, or interfere with vital research on climate change” and calls for the UK to be ready to respond by expanding its own research base.

Prof Forster told the Guardian’s Science Editor, Ian Sample: “If climate scientists in the US start to lose their jobs, we have to be ready to take up the slack.”

The story is also shared by Reuters, Press Association and Carbon Brief.