US Plans to Dismantle Major Climate Research Center

Russell Vought Photo by Allison Robbert /Photographer: Allison Robbert/Bl

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(Bloomberg) — The US plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a key climate-science hub in Boulder, Colorado, which the Trump administration says strayed from its mission decades ago by taking up climate change research. The announcement came as a shock to the scientific community as well as Colorado officials, who have vowed to fight the proposal. 

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Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said on X Tuesday night that the center, which is sponsored and funded by the National Science Foundation, would be dismantled.

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A senior White House official on Wednesday called NCAR a stronghold for left-wing climate activism. Following a review, the official said, NSF will break up NCAR to eliminate climate research activities, while functions such as weather modeling and supercomputing will be moved to another site or entity. 

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The move, first reported by USA Today, advances the Trump administration’s aggressive attacks on climate science and policy. The administration has shuttered research programs and slashed jobs across agencies that do work related to climate change, though some of those moves have been reversed by the courts. It has also rolled back environmental regulations and moved to block some renewable energy projects while strongly promoting fossil fuels. 

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President Donald Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and a “con job” and dismissed policies to counter it as “The Green New Scam.” Scientists are nearly unanimous in agreement that the atmosphere is warming due to human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels. Last year was the hottest since record-keeping began in the 19th century, and the 10 warmest years have all been in the last decade. 

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NCAR has 800-plus employees and received $123 million in core funding from the NSF in fiscal year 2025. Since its founding in 1960, generations of scientists have visited its famous Mesa Laboratory, a striking concrete structure designed by I.M. Pei. 

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The lab’s researchers have made breakthroughs including one of the first major global climate-science workhorses, the Community Earth System Model; launched in 1983, it remains one of the most powerful and tested ways for scientists to explain the effect of greenhouse gases on the physical world. NCAR has also long worked with businesses to train people and generate data useful to industry. 

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“Every country in the world would love to have something like” the center, said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University, calling the plan for its breakup “scientific vandalism.” 

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“It is the cornerstone to climate science in this country,” Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Brown University, said of NCAR. The facility had “profoundly” shaped her research and that of many other researchers around the world, she said.