Worry among scientists gets personal:

When marchers took to the streets of Washington in a proscience demonstration after US President Donald Trump’s election, it was the first time climate scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig put on an activist hat.

Rosenzweig, who works for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has spent decades researching and warning about the dangers of global warming, from punishing floods to drought.

But fears that policy-makers may ignore science and cut funding for research has had her and many like her struggling to balance scientific detachment with the urgency of their findings.

They say they worry that scepticism about climate change is diluting the gravity of their discoveries and losing the attention of the next generation of researchers.

Tens of thousands of people, including Rosenzweig and other scientists swapped lab coats for protest signs, joined the March for Science last April.

“I would say that was my tipping point,” said Rosenzweig during a United Nations-backed climate summit in Canada last week where scientists and city planners looked at ways for cities to battle climate change.

“Every scientist has to find their own place in the spectrum of science and activism,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.