Marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco wasamong the first scientists to study howecosystems off the California coast arebeing affected by climatechange. Although that work hasput her ahead of the curve, it’shurt her chances of obtainingfunding from the $1.8 billionU.S. Climate Change ScienceProgram (CCSP), the major fed-eral effort in the field. “[Its]focus has definitely not been onunderstanding impacts,” saysLubchenco, a professor at Ore-gon State University, Corvallis,and a former president of AAAS(which publishes Science).Instead, she’s relied on grants from privatefoundations to support her examination ofoxygen-depleted oceanic “dead zones.”Neither Republican John McCain norDemocrat Barack Obama has discussed cli-mate change research on the campaigntrail. But both presidential hopefuls haveweighed in on the need to better understandthe regional consequences of global warm-ing—the kind of information Lubchenco iscollecting. In May, at a townhall meeting in Portland, Ore-gon, McCain warned of “moreforest fires” and “more heatwaves afflicting our cities.” InJuly, Obama told a Dayton,Ohio, audience that climatechange could bring “devastat-ing weather patterns, terriblestorms, drought, and famine.”McCain is thinking aboutreorienting the climate re-search program toward whathis aide, Floyd DesChamps,calls “urgent impacts.” He says that theWhite House’s “21 [CCSP] reports” areinferior to the “real National Assessment”that his boss would launch. Obama’s cam-paign says he’ll stress “short-term andlong-term effects” on society and eco-systems. Both candidates have promised tostrengthen Earth monitoringand efforts to link scientists andlocal officials.To implement those changes,the next president will need to beef up and restructure the18-year-old CCSP. A string ofreports by experts say CCSP hasbeen plagued by a stagnantbudget, poor coordinationbetween participating agencies,and a lack of White House lead-ership. The U.S. National Acad-emies’ National ResearchCouncil (NRC) concluded in2007 that local and regionalofficials are receiving “inade-quate” help in preparing for potentially catastrophicchanges. Its report also pointedto the country’s “relativelyimmature” understanding ofhow climate change may affectresidents. “The health of the cli-mate science [program] is notwhat it should be,” says Repre-sentative Rush Holt (D–NJ),speaking on behalf of theObama campaign.Missed opportunitiesCreated by Congress in 1990,CCSP coordinates climate change researchacross 13 federal agencies. Initially calledthe U.S. Global Change Research Pro-gram, it helped U.S. scientists lead a globaleffort that by 1999 had, in the words of for-mer GCRP Director Richard Moss, “nailedthe question of detection, ‘Is climatechanging?’ and attribution, ‘There is ahuman cause.’ ” The next step, Moss says,would be getting a better handle on theimpacts of climate change and developingadaptation strategies.In 2002, the Bush Administrationrenamed the program and laid out five over-arching strategic goals, three addressingbasic climate science and two focused onimpacts and adaptation. But roughly 75%of the funding gets spent on the first threegoals. “They said, ‘Wait a minute, we’re notthere on the question of detection and attri-bution,’” says Moss, who ran CCSP until2006. “There was far less of a shift in theprogram than [we had proposed].”William Brennan, the current CCSP10 OCTOBER 2008 VOL 322 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org182CREDIT): NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCHNEWSFOCUSImpacts Research Seen As Next Climate FrontierScientists hope the next U.S. president will devote more of the billion-dollar climate change research program to impactsInto the woods. Research on climatechange impacts includes studyinghow forests will respond to risingtemperatures. Published by AAAS on October 10, 2008 www.sciencemag.orgDownloaded fromwww.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 322 10 OCTOBER 2008183SOURCE: U.S. CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE PROGRAMNEWSFOCUSdirector, says the lopsided emphasis withinCCSP on characterizing global climatechange over identifying impacts reflects“our state of [scientific] understanding.”But the NRC study said the U.S. programlacks the investment in data or modelingcapabilities to forecast how warmingmight create feedbacks, such as carbonreleased from warming soils or methanefrom melting tundra.As did the Clinton Administration, theBush team gave CCSP little power to setagency budgets or shift priorities. Each par-ticipating agency controls its own budgetand must approve decisions taken by CCSPstaff. “The structure discourages the CCSPcoordination office from taking initiativeson anything that even a single agency, or asingle White House official, opposes,” saysformer CCSP staffer Nick Sundt. “It’s adeficiency,” acknowledges Brennan. A report released in August by eightnational climate and weather organizationssays CCSP needs more budgetary controland recommends that its director “reportdirectly to the President.” Policy expertsbelieve a stronger CCSP could persuadeagencies to invest more in areas such asimpacts. They also argue that the effortneeds more money.The bread-and-butter climate researchbudget has hovered at about $1.9 billion inconstant dollars since 1994, although arecent downward trend has squeezed aca-demic researchers and federal climate scien-tists alike (see graph). The totals includefunds for satellite programs—more than $1 billion in some years. Infrastructureneeds for labs run by the National Oceanicand Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),the National Weather Service, and NASAtake up much of the rest, although the exactdistribution is hard to follow. (A 2005 reportby the Government Accountability Office,for example, is labeled Federal Reports onClimate Change Funding Should Be Clearerand More Complete.)The declining amount of funds actuallyavailable for scientific research has meantfewer scientists tackling increasingly com-plex issues, including modeling ice sheetsand measuring the effect of aerosols onlocal climates (Science, 22 August, p. 1032). A flat budget has also put asqueeze on hiring the next generation ofscientists. As an example, the NationalCenter for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)in Boulder, Colorado, receives 300 or somostly “outstanding” applications eachyear for postdoctoral fellowship spots butcan support only 40, says Jack Fellows ofthe University Corporation for Atmos-pheric