Trump Takes Aim at Atmospheric Science

One has to be roasting in Boulder, CO on an unseasonably hot winter day as I presently am (what is “unseasonal” any more), as I currently am, to fully appreciate the outrageous absurdity of dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research (“NCAR”) as Trump is planning to do.

NCAR is the birthplace of nearly 60 years of scientific discovery. NCAR scientists built computer models of the individual components of Earth’s climate system. Of the atmosphere and the ocean. Of the land surface and marine biogeochemistry. They coupled those components together in full Earth System Models, which capture many critical features of real-world climate. They democratized climate science by making their computer models freely available to the global research community.

“Threatening NCAR, Trump administration seeks to extinguish a beacon of climate science,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, December 19, 2025.

According to stable atmospheric genius Trump’s budget director, NCAR “is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”

It’s too bad climate change isn’t a precision munition that only targets its deniers.

I met up with an old environmental activist friend yesterday, who has been around long enough to have helped levitate the Pentagon.

We agreed that a hurricane will probably handle the levitation of Mar-a-Lago for us.

But when it comes to climate catastrophuck, “I told you so” isn’t much solace.

Those with brains and hearts are left waiting for Scarecrow Trump and Tin Man Vance to blow back out of O(z)ffice, so we can resume the work of trying to see to it that it snows again in Boulder in the winters.

This first appeared on Ben Rosenfeld’s Substack.

 

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