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Proposed elimination of NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, by the Trump Administration has been much written about and commented upon, justifiably so. This brief article seeks to add information and some considerations not always noted in this coverage.
To begin, NCAR is a world-renowned place for basic research on the Earth's atmosphere, weather, oceans, ice, and the unceasing interactions among them. Founded in 1960 by the U.S. National Science Foundation and managed by a consortium now including 130 universities, it has been a vital institution of American leadership in science, supported by presidents and Congresses for 65 years.
Located in a dramatic setting below the soaring flatirons of Colorado's Front Range and designed by famed architect I.M. Pei, NCAR is a legendary institution in the global scientific community. That it is now threatened with liquidation by the Trump Administration marks a blunt repudiation of its long history of support and denial of the recognized status it has earned over many decades of fundamental contribution.
Trump has justified this move by accusing NCAR of acting as "the premier research stronghold for left-wing climate lunacy." His Office of Management and Budget Director, Russel Vought, identifies it as a major source "of climate alarmism," and claims that "any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location."
Commentators have proposed that Trump is also angry with Colorado's governor, Jared Polis, for refusing to pardon a state official convicted of election tampering in the 2020 presidential election.
What NCAR Does And Why Breaking It Up Will Destroy It
The killing of NCAR for such reasons is hard to fathom. In fact, the Center is concerned with matters that go well beyond climate. These include, for instance, the birth and evolution of major storms; the chemistry and physics of the oceans and polar ice; the physics of the Sun and its effects on Earth. But its research work also takes up the impacts of these domains on society, from the damaging power of tornadoes and factors of air quality to the probability and behavior of wildfires.
Part of the Center's mission is improving the ability to forecast extreme events and therefore reduce their threat to human life and well-being. Even for those who, for whatever reason, still deny the fact of climate change and its growing impacts, this type of research will be worthy, even necessary. The increasing deaths, injuries, and costs due to major storm and flooding events in the U.S. do not pay attention to red and blue state voting patterns.
To do its work in this area, as in others, NCAR has been a hub of supercomputing resources. These are among the largest of any Earth System research institution worldwide. Breaking them up into separate entities or locations would destroy their combined advantage. All of the research areas mentioned above are deeply interrelated, so a great deal of their progress is interdisciplinary, requiring centralized, high-end resources.
Shattering these and believing some areas, like weather research, can just continue on without damage is not only an error. It reveals a profound lack of understanding of how contemporary science actually works, especially that related to the challenging complexities of Earth's atmosphere.
A National And A Global Hub
There is another dimension to NCAR's value that deserves mention. While it employs hundreds of its own scientists, it also acts as a research center for many academic researchers and their students, reaching a still greater number through the workshops and training courses it offers.
Moreover, it has long been a crucial hub of collaboration. In the 1980s, its administrators recognized a structural disconnect. While the Center was concerned with global phenomena, it was itself a North American product -- foreign institutions remained "outsiders." The Affiliates Program was created in 1985 to change this, opening the door to institutions worldwide. A sample of its 52 affiliates today includes: Al Azhar University in Egypt; the Central Weather Bureau in Taiwan; Federal University of Technology, Nigeria; Peking University and Chinese Academy of Sciences; and Universidad de Chile.
Finally (but this is far from a complete accounting), NCAR gives to the world scientific community a host of open-source resources. Computational models, software, curated datasets, and specialized AI are available for external researchers and graduate students to use, modify, and adapt to suit their own projects.
In this sense, NCAR is today much more than a heavyweight of data generation and publications. It can only be understood as a planetary epicenter of scientific work on fundamental phenomena that affect human life -- indeed, all life -- in every part of the world.
What Dismantling Really Means
Everything said above highlights the truth that NCAR has been a vital institution contributing to U.S. leadership. Eliminating such an institution without weighty cause -- "climate lunacy" being somewhat questionable as such -- qualifies as a serious injury to a central domain of American success and security.
But it also something else -- a direct attack on global science.
Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has been a driving force in the globalization of basic scientific research, its expansion beyond the borders of a few dozen wealthy nations to a much greater portion of the modern world. This has meant creating opportunities for collaboration between U.S. researchers and those in a wider array of countries than ever before, including many in the Global South. This expansion is still at an early stage; it has serious inequities and has suffered important failures. But it is real and continuing.
NCAR's role in this new era of basic science might well provide the White House with yet another reason to eliminate it. Either way, the loss that it would represent would add significantly to the degradation of American and world science that this administration has tragically pursued.