Russell Vought moves to destroy government’s leading climate change research institution

Trump administration to dismantle key climate research center

Russell Vought, who directs the White House Office of Management and Budget, announced plans to split up the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, citing concerns about “climate alarmism.”

The Trump administration said it was breaking up one of the world’s preeminent earth and atmospheric research institutions Tuesday over concerns about “climate alarmism” — a move some Democratic state officials and scientists called an assault on science and education.

“The National Science Foundation will be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado,” wrote Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget on X. “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”

The plan was first reported by USA Today.

The NCAR laboratory in Boulder was founded in 1960 at the base of the Rocky Mountains to conduct research and educate future scientists. Its resources include supercomputers, valuable datasets and high-tech research planes.

Its dismantling would be a major loss for scientific research, said Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at NCAR and an honorary academic in physics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Trenberth, who joined NCAR in 1984 and officially retired in 2020, said the research center is key to advanced climate science discoveries as well as in informing the climate models that produce the weather forecasts we see on the nightly news.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) said in a statement that the state had not received information about the administration’s intentions to dismantle NCAR.

“If true, public safety is at risk and science is being attacked,” said Polis. “Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science. NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families.”

In his social media post, Vought said that “any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location” — but did not specify further.

The move comes as Republicans have escalated their attacks on Polis and others in the state for their handling of a case involving Tina Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado who was convicted in state court on felony charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. President Donald Trump announced last week that he is pardoning Peters, who is serving a nine-year sentence, but it is unclear whether Trump has that authority, because she was not convicted in federal court.

Antonio Busalacchi, the president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which oversees NCAR, said it was aware of reports to break up the center but did not have “additional information about any such plan.”

“Any plans to dismantle NSF NCAR would set back our nation’s ability to predict, prepare for, and respond to severe weather and other natural disasters,” Busalacchi said.

NCAR plays a unique role in the scientific community by bringing together otherwise siloed specialists to collaborate on some of the biggest climate and weather questions of our time, said Caspar Ammann, a former research scientist at the center.

“Without NCAR, a lot could not happen,” he said. “A lot of research at US Universities would immediately get hampered, industry would lose access to reliable base data.”

Ammann added that global weather and climate services use NCAR modeling and forecasting tools.

The Colorado-based center draws scientists and lecturers from all over the world, and through its education programs has helped produce future scientists, Trenberth said.

He said he feared not just for the discoveries and data that would be lost if the center were to close, but for the early careers that could also be affected or destroyed.

“If this sort of thing happens, things will go on for a little while,” he said, “But the next generation of people who deal with weather and science in the United States will be lost.”

. . . this is straight up political vengeance because Jared Polis isn’t willing to pardon Tina Peters:

“Maybe if Colorado had a governor who actually wanted to work with President Trump, his constituents would be better served,” said a senior White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were “not at liberty to discuss internal discussions.”

I happen to know more than a little about NCAR because my sister in law is an atmospheric research scientist who has worked there for 36 years, ever since getting her Ph.D. in physical chemistry from a top department, instead of doing what Russell Vought has done to enlighten himself on these issues, which is google endless amounts of made up right wing bullshit on the internet.

So this hits close to home, which in theory shouldn’t make a difference, but in practice always does, because I’ve seen up close the kind of work my SIL does at NCAR, and how scientifically complex and intellectually sophisticated and mentally and physically challenging it is — she has spent much of the last three decades flying over rainforests and oceans in a C-130 — and this story absolutely enrages me. And of course there are countless other stories like this, that I either know much less or nothing about, because circumstances happen to highlight this one for me personally.

These people are nothing less than vandals, who are destroying institutions of immeasurable value in the service of a reactionary cult made up of unhinged religious zealots and possibly even more unhinged billionaires with delusions of technoimmortality and who knows what else.

We are reaching the point where very little would be indefensible in regard to stopping them.

Commenter:

Atmospheric scientist here (“username checks out” say fellow meteorologists and literally no one else). I’m not at NCAR but I collaborate with many people who are.

It’s hard to overstate just how critical NCAR is to, well, everything. The media is characterizing this as Trump vs. climate change. And it’s true: NCAR does a lot of climate change research. But they do so much more beyond that. They’re the ones that make our forecasts, through enhanced understanding of atmospheric processes and programming the next generation of forecast models. They foster innovation in atmospheric observations, since we need to better understand the current state of the atmosphere in order to have more accurate predictions of the future. They operate targeted campaigns around the world to observe specific weather phenomena so that we can better understand the underlying physics. Unlike other sciences, it’s not like we can just run experiments in a lab: we need data of events where they happen, and NCAR is the unquestioned world leader on that front. Our society needs NCAR and we’re just going to destroy it because we are a profoundly unserious people.

I’m struggling to even come up with an analogy absurd enough to describe what the impact of this is. This is like tearing down the municipal waterworks because you think hydration is an evil plot, or blowing up a bridge across the Mississippi because it’s sometimes used by black people. It goes beyond absurd to purely depraved.