Yesterday, the Trump Administration announced that it was taking steps to shut down the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). USA Today broke the story:
The Trump administration is moving to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, according to a senior White House official, taking aim at one of the world’s leading climate research labs.
Trump officials have circled the federally funded research institution, based in Boulder, Colorado, as a hub for “federal climate alarmism” after it was established decades earlier in 1960 for research in atmospheric chemistry and physical meteorology.
The administration plans to identify and eliminate what it calls “green new scam research activities” during an upcoming review of the center, according to the White House, while “vital functions” such as weather modeling and supercomputing will be moved to another entity or location.
Before proceeding — full disclosure — I am not a neutral observer. I have NCAR to thank for my entire career.
I worked at NCAR as a FORTRAN programmer in the late 1980s while an undergraduate in mathematics at the University of Colorado, just down the hill. NCAR is where I first became interested in science policy, as I worked for and alongside some of the world’s leading atmospheric chemists who were studying ozone depletion. I also got to interact with and get to know some of the giants of climatology — Walter Orr Roberts, Warren Washington, Will Kellogg, Steve Schnieder, and Mickey Glantz among them.
I returned to NCAR in the early 1990s when I was working on my PhD, which was focused on how to organize climate research to best meet the needs of policy makers. NCAR made my thesis possible. That stint turned into a post-doc in NCAR’s social science group (terminated about 15 years ago, unwisely, but that’s a story for another day), working on floods, hurricanes, and the use of predictions. The post-doc turned into a position as a staff scientist, a role I held until 2001 and my move to CU Boulder.
Last year, when I cleared out my office at the university, NCAR graciously offered to take many hundreds of books and reports I had collected over the years related to the atmospheric sciences, and created the Roger Pielke Jr. collection. They even arranged to come to my office to collect the voluminous material. I’m grateful.
NCAR is not a government laboratory — it is an FFRDC (Federally Funded Research and Development Center) funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and overseen by a non-profit called the University Cooperation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which is overseen by a consortium of more than 100 universities.
FFRDCs exist to support science in the public interest but these organizations are not established in legislation, but administratively through the executive branch. Consequently, an administration also has the authority to terminate an FFRDC:
When a sponsor’s need for the FFRDC no longer exists, the sponsorship may be transferred to one or more Government agencies, if appropriately justified. If the FFRDC is not transferred to another Government agency, it shall be phased out.
NCAR was founded in 1960 to conduct atmospheric sciences research at a scale larger than could be conducted at any single university:
In 1956, the National Academy of Sciences convened a committee of distinguished scientists to investigate the state of meteorology. Noting the size and complexity of atmospheric problems and the inadequate resources for solving them, the committee recommended an exponential increase in support for basic research. Coupled with new funding, the committee planned to establish a national institute (later called a national center) for atmospheric research to be operated by a consortium of universities with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
NCAR was located in Boulder, Colorado to be far from leading research universities, [1] like MIT or UCLA, and Walter Orr Roberts played an important role in picking its location.
NCAR, for many decades, emphasized supercomputing — it still does, but to a lesser degree. Today, NCAR’s budget is more than $120 million and employs more than 800 people. The organization conducts research widely related to the atmospheric sciences — including atmospheric chemistry, climate dynamics, solar physics, meteorology, observational technology, computing and more.
Here is how NCAR describes its mission:
NCAR’s mission is to understand the behavior of the atmosphere and related Earth and geospace systems; to support, enhance, and extend the capabilities of the academic and broader scientific communities, nationally and internationally; and to foster the transfer of knowledge and technology for the betterment of life on Earth. NCAR fulfills this mission with highly integrated research and facilities organized around three overlapping primary areas of activity: cutting edge airborne and ground-based observational facilities; community weather and climate models with many thousands of users worldwide; and petascale high-performance computing. Cross-cutting programs promote education, career development, public engagement, and increased diversity for the entire geosciences community. NCAR maintains an extensive range of partnerships throughout the academic, private, and government sectors.
Bibliometric analyses identify NCAR as one of the world’s top-five most prolific institutional contributors to atmospheric sciences, ranking alongside NOAA and NASA among top organizations in publications and high-impact research.
NCAR certainly does have room for improvement. For instance, it has often been criticized for competing unfairly with university researchers for scarce federal research funding. The organization would benefit from greater attention to a mission that could not be accomplished via competitive grants awarded to university-based scientists. In addition, NCAR’s parent organization — UCAR — has long suffered from mission creep resulting is a growing portfolio of activities well beyond NCAR. In my view, NCAR should be the mission, full stop.
The Trump administration’s claim that NCAR is a home to “climate alarmism” is simply false.
Trust me — I call out politicized climate science all the time, and NCAR is not even on the list of institutions that I’d name in this category. NCAR has in the past certainly been home to climate activists (like Steve Schneider or Kevin Trenberth) and has also taken on institutional positions that arguably went beyond its mission, [2] but today NCAR is just a big science organization filled with nerds trying to make the world a better place.
Climate research is just a small slice of NCAR’s overall activities. Remarkably, NCAR’s 2025-2029 Strategic Plan does not even mention the word “climate,” much less “climate change.” That omission was surely a tactical choice, given the current political environment. The larger point is that NCAR conducts a vast array of important research with nothing to do with climate science, policy, or politics.
I have no inside information but it sure looks like the Trump Administration is taking a metaphorical sledgehammer to institutions that might have anything to do with something somwhow related to “climate.” The announced termination of NCAR might also have something to do with President Trump’s recent anger at the Governor of Colorado, Jared Polis (a Democrat — well, a libertarian really, but I digress!). Either way, it is “Own the Libs” as science policy.
The announced shuttering of NCAR follows no apparent strategy, meets no stated national need, and will cause irreparible harm to the U.S. scientific community, while decimating atmospheric sciences research — which is central to the economy and public safety.
It would be perfectly fair to call for NCAR to be modernized and improved and to take steps to make that happen. That would be smart science policy. What we are getting from the Trump administration instead is vindictive governance, which is the opposite of smart. Congress? Over to you . . .
[1] At that time the University of Colorado Boulder had no program in atmospheric sciences.
[2] To be clear, scientists at NCAR have academic freedom — if they wish to engage in climate activism, more power to them. My concerns about politicized climate science is focused on institutions not individuals.