How Trump’s latest assault on climate science, dismantling NCAR, fulfills a Project 2025 goal
In his address to the nation last week, President Donald Trump said, “We’re the hottest country anywhere in the world, and that’s said by every single leader that I’ve spoken to over the last five months.”
We’re hot all right, but not in the way Trump means. Last year was the warmest on record for the contiguous United States and for all of Earth, according to data confirmed by almost every publishing scientist — 97% of them, according to NASA. A 2021 study found a greater than 99% consensus in the scientific literature that says climate change is driven by human burning of fossil fuels. The study said the certainty that there is climate change and that we’re causing it is at the level of plate tectonics and evolution.
We’re hot all right, but not in the way Trump means.
Yet the day before Trump’s address, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, posted on social media that the administration is “breaking up” the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). It was because the White House has identified the center, based in Boulder, Colorado, as one of “the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” as Vought put it.
The NCAR, with its 830 employees, is a fulcrum for the nation’s Earth systems research. It was created by the National Science Foundation 65 years ago to provide resources for a consortium that now includes 129 colleges and universities. That consortium can conduct research in ways no individual university can.
If the breakup goes through, then it would be a key political victory for Trump and a personal victory for Vought. He’s one of the climate-denying architects of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s right-wing blueprint for the dismantling of many functions of the federal government. In a chapter of Project 2025 that Vought personally wrote, he said the Biden administration’s “climate fanaticism” needed a “whole-of-government unwinding.”
A disintegration of NCAR means the U.S. government would be choosing to fly blind into climate disaster, even as we have already reached record levels of destruction. In 2023 the nation experienced an unprecedented 28 weather and climate disasters that cost at least $1 billion to fix, and 2024 almost tied the record, with 27. Adjusting for inflation, the average number of billion-dollar disasters for the past five years (23) is about seven times more than the average number of them (3.3) in the 1980s. Extreme weather in the U.S. has cost us 6,400 lives and $1.5 trillion in costs over the past decade. This year, the Los Angeles wildfires became the most expensive in the nation’s history, causing $60 billion worth of damage.
But instead of being alarmed at the explosion in frequency of such catastrophes, the Trump administration has announced it will no longer update the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters reports, saying such documents are no longer “in alignment with evolving priorities.” The environmental website Climate Central is independently maintaining the data.
The landmark reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, included the contributions of 39 NCAR scientists. NCAR research informs our knowledge of the risks of extreme heat and vector-borne diseases fueled by global warming. NCAR researchers are at the center of efforts to predict floods, tropical cyclones, air-quality effects and weather that can disrupt transportation and agriculture. NCAR’s research on air turbulence, deicing and lightning strikes have made aviation safer. In one area that no conservative could possibly complain about, NCAR’s weather research and intelligence aids the Army and the Navy in their missile and weapons testing, and informed U.S. troops during this country’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
NCAR is an intense developing ground for some of the most sophisticated Earth system modeling, particularly the Community Earth System Model. It’s such a fertile field for the next generation of Earth scientists that Brown University climate scientist Kim Cobb called the center the “beating heart of our field.”
Trump and Vought’s wish to still the beating heart of climate research is beyond any logic, especially because extreme weather does not discriminate between red states and blue states. Everybody’s at risk, be it from hurricanes and storms in the crimson-red Deep South, wildfires in cobalt-blue California or tornadoes in the swing states of the Midwest. The plan to dismantle NCAR is even more perverse considering the global implications of the U.S. withdrawing from the global stage of weather and climate change modeling.
The United States is privileged in that it gets to measure weather and climate disasters more in terms of property damage than in lives lost. But the opposite is true in under-resourced nations. Two years ago, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) estimated that 2 million people have been killed around the world since 1970 in storms, drought, heat and floods. Nine of every 10 deaths were in under-resourced nations.
Even so, Petteri Taalas, who was then the secretary-general of the WMO, said that accurate weather forecasting and early preparation reduced the death toll from cyclones and floods that decades ago routinely killed hundreds of thousands of people in parts of Asia. “Thanks to early warnings and disaster management, these catastrophic mortality rates are now thankfully history,” Taalas said.
Taalas may have given thanks too soon, as the world’s richest nation conducts the world’s most concentrated assault on weather and climate science. Speaking before the United Nations in September, Trump bragged that the U.S. was getting rid of renewable energy and called the green movement the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
Now that he’s also thrusting a stake through the heart of Earth science, Trump is on his way to making our country hotter than we can stand.
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