On Tuesday, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, announced that a major climate research center will be “broken up.” The National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, is a major contributor to research into weather, climate, and other atmospheric phenomena. This move will be a crippling blow to US climate research and is widely condemned by scientists.
Vought initially made a statement about NCAR to USA Today and later confirmed the outlet's reporting on social media. Vought called it “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and also denounced what he called “woke” activities at NCAR. These appear to be fairly typical efforts to attract underrepresented groups to the sciences—efforts that were uncontested before the current administration.
NCAR is primarily based in a complex on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado, and has a supercomputing center in Wyoming. Much of the funding comes from the National Science Foundation, but day-to-day management is handled by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), a nonprofit organization representing 130 individual educational institutions. In addition to climate science, researchers based there also study terrestrial and space weather, atmospheric chemistry and their impact on the environment and humans. NCAR hosts a series of web pages explaining the research and all the ways it helps society.
Vought indicates that the government will focus specifically on what is called “green new scam research activities,” while other aspects of the center's work will be moved to different institutions. However, the government does not directly manage operations at NCAR, and it is not clear whether its agreement with UCAR allows it to directly order these types of changes (we contacted the National Science Foundation to ask, but have not yet received a response). UCAR, in turn, released a statement indicating that the USA Today article was the first it had heard of the case.
