Much of the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s non-climate portfolio will be dispersed, the White House says.

The administration of US President Donald Trump intends to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a world-leading Earth-science centre in Boulder, Colorado.

The centre’s modelling and Earth observations underpin a wide range of US and global research, especially on climate. Nature.com has the story.

“This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” wrote Russell Vought, Trump’s budget director, announcing the planned closure in a post yesterday on the social-media platform X. In a statement, the White House called NCAR “the premier research stronghold for left-wing climate lunacy”. The plan was first reported by USA Today.

The White House said that the National Science Foundation (NSF), which provides funding for the centre, “will be breaking up NCAR to eliminate Green New Scam research activities. Any vital functions, such as weather modeling and supercomputing, will be moved under the purview of another entity or location.”

On Wednesday, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) — the non-profit consortium of more than 130 colleges and universities that runs NCAR — received a letter of intent from the NSF regarding the planned break-up of NCAR, consortium president Antonio Busalacchi told Nature.

The letter requested information regarding divesting, transferring or restructuring the various components of NCAR. It mentioned NCAR’s research aircraft fleet and its supercomputing center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, as components that might be relocated. “Morale is terrible,” Busalacchi says.

Any such action will be challenged by members of Congress. “I for one am not going to let this take place on my watch,” Joe Neguse, a Democrat who represents Boulder in the US House of Representatives, said Wednesday in a virtual address to the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. Congress sets the federal budget and can direct the US government to fund NCAR.

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