“Spirit, are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom,….
– Dickens, A Christmas Carol
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Future generations will not understand.
The worst epidemic we face is not measles, it’s ignorance. Not just ignorance, but an absolute hatred for knowledge and expertise. This fills me with sadness and dread.
The US plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a key climate-science agency that the Trump administration is calling a source of environmental activism.
“This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” Russel Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, said on X Tuesday evening. A review of the Boulder, Colorado-based center is underway, and vital functions such as weather research will be moved to other agencies.
The move advances the administration’s aggressive attacks on climate science, which President Donald Trump has repeatedly called “The Green New Scam.” He’s implemented policies to promote fossil fuels, taken steps to undermine existing programs that supported clean energy and curtailed important environmental regulations aimed at limiting carbon emissions.
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Climate scientist Chris Colose reacts to Budget Director Russ Vought’s tweet on the matter:
It comes after President Donald Trump has also pushed massive cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, including eliminating the agency’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and ending funding for its climate, weather and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes.
The NCAR’s staff is made up of about 830 employees who are part of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), a nonprofit consortium of more than 130 colleges and universities focused on research and training in Earth system sciences. It is unclear how many jobs and programs the dismantling could affect.
The National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency, contracts the university consortium to manage the center. The NSF provided $123 million to the NCAR in the 2025 fiscal year, according to Science magazine, accounting for about half the center’s budget.
In addition to the Mesa Laboratory, the NCAR operates two aircraft for atmospheric research and manages a federally owned supercomputing center in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
The White House pointed to “UCAR’s woke direction,” singling out several initiatives Trump officials said are wasteful and frivolous.
The flagged programs include a Rising Voices Center for Indigenous and Earth Sciences that seeks to “make the sciences more welcoming, inclusive, and justice-centered”; an art series aimed at building “our relationship with water through mediums such as recycled materials, photography, oil paintings, and more”; and research into wind turbines that seek to “better understand and predict the impact of weather conditions and changing climate on offshore wind production.”
Trump regularly refers to climate change as a “hoax” or a “con job” ‒ even though the vast majority of scientists say climate change is real and have raised alarm over rising temperatures.
NCAR is widely known internationally for advancements in the study of weather, including tropical cyclones, scientists told USA TODAY as they learned of the latest proposal.
GPS dropsondes, the expendable tools dropped from aircraft into the eye of a hurricane to gather critical data, were developed at NCAR, said James Franklin, a retired chief of the branch of hurricane specialists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center.
The dropsonde “revolutionized” the understanding of tropical cyclone structure and improved forecasts, Franklin said.
Many of the big advances in weather prediction originated at the atmospheric research center, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California. He’s been a research partner with NCAR since 2018 but is not an employee.
More Scientists react:
Trump & his ilk hate all objective information. I know we all know this. The destruction of NCAR is is another gut punch to reason – this time with a personal component. NCAR is a bastion of science and key to helping us find our way toward a better climate future. NCAR is made up of brilliant and dedicated scientists. Wherever I look, I see us throwing away our leadership position in science research and education. We are throwing away the future at the behest of nitwits who don’t give a damn about posterity and have no capacity to understand anything other than their own talking points. One of my dear old friends has a key leadership position at NCAR. I hope he survives the wreck without too much injury.
Inconvenient truths are all too easy to ignore — that is, if you’re privileged enough…