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SUNDAY SCIENCE: TRUMP TEAM PLANS TO BREAK UP ‘GLOBAL MOTHERSHIP’
OF CLIMATE SCIENCE  
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Alexandra Witze
December 17, 2025
Nature [[link removed]]

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_ Much of the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s
non-climate portfolio will be dispersed, the White House says. _

The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado,
has been targeted for breakup by the Trump administration., John
Greim/LightRocket/Getty

 

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

The administration of US President Donald Trump intends to dismantle
the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a world-leading
Earth-science centre in Boulder, Colorado. The centre’s modelling
and Earth observations underpin a wide range of US and global
research, especially on climate.

“This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in
the country,” wrote Russell Vought, Trump’s budget director,
announcing the planned closure in a post yesterday on the social-media
platform X. In a statement, the White House called NCAR “the premier
research stronghold for left-wing climate lunacy”. The plan was
first reported
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by _USA Today_.

The White House said that the National Science Foundation (NSF)
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which provides funding for the centre, “will be breaking up NCAR to
eliminate Green New Scam research activities. Any vital functions,
such as weather modeling and supercomputing, will be moved under the
purview of another entity or location.”

On Wednesday, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
(UCAR) — the non-profit consortium of more than 130 colleges and
universities that runs NCAR — received a letter of intent from the
NSF regarding the planned break-up of NCAR, consortium president
Antonio Busalacchi told _Nature_. The letter requested information
regarding divesting, transferring or restructuring the various
components of NCAR. It mentioned NCAR’s research aircraft fleet and
its supercomputing center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, as components that
might be relocated. “Morale is terrible,” Busalacchi says.

Any such action will be challenged by members of Congress. “I for
one am not going to let this take place on my watch,” Joe Neguse, a
Democrat who represents Boulder in the US House of Representatives,
said Wednesday in a virtual address to the American Geophysical Union
meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. Congress sets the federal budget
and can direct the US government to fund NCAR.

The most recent agreement between the NSF and UCAR, which was signed
in 2023, provides US$938 million to run NCAR for five years.
Cancelling that award would eliminate the majority of NCAR’s annual
budget. The rest of the budget comes from an array of federal and
non-federal sources.

CENTRAL RESOURCE

News of the intended closure rippled quickly through the Earth-science
community, with many starting a #SaveNCAR discussion across
social-media platforms. “Dismantling NCAR is like taking a
sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding
of the planet,” wrote Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas
Tech University in Lubbock, on social media, adding that the
laboratory is the “global mothership” of atmospheric science.

“To me personally, it’s just another unbelievably reckless blow to
American science”, says Dawn Wright, an oceanographer and geographer
at Esri, a geographic-information-system company in Redlands,
California. “If the NSF does follow through with these plans to
break up NCAR, that’s just going to decimate a huge chunk of the US
climate research that we all depend on.”

The NSF established NCAR in 1960 to support US atmospheric-science
research that requires computing or other resources beyond the means
of any single institution. “If you cancel this, you will devastate
atmospheric science,” says a researcher who formerly worked at the
NSF and requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the
situation. “That’s different from other sciences that are more
distributed.”

Work at NCAR played a key part in the rise of modern weather and
climate forecasting. For instance, the lab pioneered the modern
dropwindsonde, a weather instrument that can be released from an
aircraft to measure conditions as it plummets through a storm. The
technology reshaped the scientific understanding of hurricanes, says
James Franklin, an atmospheric scientist and former branch chief of
the hurricane specialist unit at the US National Hurricane Center in
Miami, Florida.

NCAR scientists “collaborate with outside researchers and
forecasters, develop and share models and other tools with the science
community, and serve as custodians of important data sets used for
research”, Franklin says.

NCAR also flies aircraft to gather data for research such as studies
of the chemistry of wildfire smoke
[[link removed]]. It has led
research into atmospheric rivers, the bands of water vapour
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coastal communities and lead to flooding, such as that currently
affecting Washington.

RESEARCH POWERHOUSE

On the global scale, NCAR is known for its climate-modelling work,
including the world-leading models that underpin international
assessments such as those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change [[link removed]] (IPCC). It
is unclear how efforts to close NCAR might affect the upcoming IPCC
assessment, which is due to be completed in 2029 and is based on the
outputs of dozens of climate models run around the globe, including at
NCAR.

Hundreds of scientists pass through NCAR’s doors each year to
collaborate with its researchers. More than 800 people are employed at
NCAR, most of whom work at the centre’s three campuses in Boulder,
including the iconic Mesa Lab that sits at the base of jagged mountain
peaks and was designed by architect I. M. Pei.

That campus was closed on Wednesday, not because of Vought’s
announcement but because the local electrical company planned to cut
electricity preemptively to reduce wildfire risk as fierce winds were
forecast around Boulder. In 2021, a wildfire ignited just kilometres
from NCAR; fuelled by powerful winds, it ripped through suburban
homes, killing two people. Many researchers say this is a new normal
of increased fire risk in an era of climate change — a topic of
study at NCAR.

_doi: __https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-04134-w_
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_ALEXANDRA WITZE is an award-winning science journalist and
correspondent for the journal Nature. Her reporting has taken her from
the North Pole (to report on climate change) to the jungles of
Guatemala (to cover Maya archaeology) to China's quake-ravaged Sichuan
province. Island on Fire is her first book and she lives in Boulder,
CO._

_NATURE is a weekly international journal publishing the finest
peer-reviewed research in all fields of science and technology on the
basis of its originality, importance, interdisciplinary interest,
timeliness, accessibility, elegance and surprising conclusions. Nature
also provides rapid, authoritative, insightful and arresting news and
interpretation of topical and coming trends affecting science,
scientists and the wider public._

_Nature's mission statement_

_First, to serve scientists through prompt publication of significant
advances in any branch of science, and to provide a forum for the
reporting and discussion of news and issues concerning science.
Second, to ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated
to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their
significance for knowledge, culture and daily life._

_Nature's original mission statement was published for the first time
on 11 November 1869._

 

 

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* National Center for Atmospheric Research
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* Climate
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