Climate scientists around the globe were stunned to hear on December 15 that the Trump administration was breaking up one of the world’s preeminent Earth and atmospheric research institutions. The reason? It was promoting “climate alarmism.”
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), based in Boulder, Colorado, was created in 1960 to conduct research and educate future scientists. Many of the big advances in weather prediction originated at the center, the University of California’s Daniel Swain told The Washington Post.
Those advances include severe weather warnings, the reduced harm from those earlier warnings and looking at the economic impacts of what tomorrow’s weather or weather a few days from now might bring, Swain explained.
NCAR research has played a leading role in improving weather forecasting. Three-day forecasts have been more than 80-percent accurate since the 1980s and are now about 97-percent accurate; five-day forecasts hit the 80-percent threshold in the early 2000s, and seven-day forecasts are approaching it today.
“Human-caused changes in the global climate have fundamentally changed the weather, making extreme conditions not only possible but also more likely,” Michelle Nijhuis wrote in The Atlantic. “Without ongoing research on climate change, forecasters would be less able to predict deadly weather events such as last week’s flooding in the Pacific Northwest…”
The center is “quite literally our global mothership,” Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University professor and chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy, wrote on X.
According to the White House, the administration plans to identify and eliminate what it calls "green new scam research activities" during an upcoming review of the center, while "vital functions" such as weather modeling and supercomputing will be moved to another entity or location. Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, who announced the decision, said that “a comprehensive review is underway.” But why not complete that review before shutting down such an esteemed research center?
Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has been vocal in his concern over climate alarmism and the politicization of climate science and weather disasters. Though he considers NCAR far from perfect, Pielke told USA TODAY that it’s “a crown jewel of the U.S. scientific enterprise and deserves to be improved, not shuttered. If the U.S. is going to be a global leader in the atmospheric sciences, then it cannot afford to make petty and vindictive decisions based on the hot politics of climate change.”
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, Caspar Ammann, a former research scientist at the center, told The Washington Post.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D) said, “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.”
The New York Times noted that President Trump “routinely mocks climate change as a hoax and his administration has labeled virtually all efforts to study climate change, reduce the level of dangerous greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or protect communities from the impacts of global warming as ‘alarmism.’”