opinion
For over 50 years, NOAA has been a pioneer in climate research and has been committed to advancing modern weather forecasts. The future of this valuable public asset currently being labelled as part of the “climate warning industry” by Project 2025 and facing Doge-led cuts is at stake.
A few weeks ago, a very bright and capable young scientist I know was fired from his job at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Institute (GFDL) in Princeton, New Jersey. I met her about five years ago when she was a graduate student and had been in touch with her through the subsequent appointment of a post-doctor. She started with GFDL last fall and was on probation status as a new federal employee. Ten scientists with that status were fired from GFDL that day. NOAA was later instructed by the Trump administration to fire another 1,000 as part of the “power cut.” It’s not clear if that stops there or not.
Every scientist in the world studying the atmosphere and the ocean knows the name of GFDL, and perhaps some of the past or present scientists. Syukuro Manabe, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2021 for developing some of the first and most elegant climate models in the 1960s, built his career there.
NOAA was not a left-wing activist organization, but was part of a military industrial complex from the start.
When I was an assistant professor at Columbia University in the early 2000s, I regularly traveled to visit from New York City to Princeton. Isaac held it. The former student at Manabe’s Hold is one of the most talented and influential scientists in our field and is the leader of many climate scientists working today. The GFDL building on Princeton University’s quiet satellite campus is a charming black glass and steel cubes, but walking through the hall was magical. As a young scientist seeking insight into the complexities of planetary turbulence in the atmosphere, I felt at the heart of the world.
GFDL is most well known for its climate work, but the lab also plays a central role in weather forecasting. Maryland-based NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) generates National Weather Service forecasts by operating a set of computer models. These models have the so-called dynamic core, which is the gut that determines how it moves from one moment to the next, a simulated atmosphere of a model developed in GFDL. (In early March, Elon Musk’s government efficiency includes buildings on the list of federal leases that will be cancelled with EMC, and their status is unknown.)
In fact, for the years immediately following World War II, modern weather forecasts themselves began at Princeton, Advanced Research Institute. Digital computers are new, leading physicist and mathematician John von Neumann realized that these new machines are good problems to tackle. He put together a team of top atmospheric scientists led by Jule Charney to find a way to use a new machine called the Eniac, solving equations that explain the physics of atmospheric motion quickly and accurately, making them accurate enough to make useful predictions. They built their first successful weather forecasting model, and the US Weather Service, now known as the National Weather Service, quickly adopted the technology.
Charney’s team had another young scientist named Joseph Smagorinski. (Charney and Smagorinsky were both children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, and von Neumann was the Eastern European Jewish immigrants themselves.) After the success of the Princeton Project, Smagorinsky was hired by the US Weather Service and named it in 1963, in 1955. 1968. GFDL became part of NOAA after the agency was established in 1970, and Smagorinsky led the lab until his retirement in 1983.
Research at the Lamont-Doherty Observatory, where El Nino’s predictions were pioneered, is also under threat by the Trump administration.
The current attack on NOAA appears to be a manifestation of Project 2025. It is labelled “one of the leading drivers in the climate warning industry.” However, the agency was part of the military industrial facility from the start. Von Neumann had the resources and authority to launch a weather forecasting project for the work he and other physicists did. Manhattan Project. And since then, the fields of weather, oceanography and climate science continued to grow from an alliance between science and the military.
Satellites, computers, and radar are all developed in both military and weather and climate science applications. Much of what we know about the ocean is the result of Navy-funded research, including things that have been done in my own agency; Lamont-Doherty Earth ObservatoryPlate Tectonics and El Nino predictions are both pioneering, and are now threatened by the Trump administration through the current attack on Columbia University, where Lamont is currently taking part.
Scientists, including John von Neumann, second from the left, and Jules Charney on the right, used the ENIAC computer to make the first successful figures of weather forecasts.
Provided by MIT Museum
Even the human-induced science of climate change has military roots. In the 1950s and 1960s, the effects of carbon dioxide on temperature began to be understood, leading scientists were called meetings with members of Congress and military generals. The military has remained practical about climate science since then. Until now.
NOAA’s recent planned cuts are, as intended, deeply threatening climate science. GFDL. At the Mauna Roa Observatory, the Hawaiian lab that maintains the longest record of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Other places. Daily weather forecasts are also threatened as the launch of weathered balloons has been cancelled and staff will be reduced to maintain and upgrade. This appears to be a feature rather than a bug, as Project 2025 is seeking privatization of weather forecasts. However, many private companies that already sell weather forecasts, as well as other users in both the private and public sector (such as the insurance industry) rely on free NOAA data and don’t want to erase it. It remains to be seen how important it is, and how important it is, to the extent that the public goods provided by NOAA is taken away or taken away.
If NOAA’s work raises any kind of alarm on the climate, it’s because the data is amazing, not because they have an agenda that goes beyond its mission.
It is not clear which point in history “make America great again” refers to. However, postwar economic prosperity, which was taken by the generations that were commonplace for older generations, was built on stable, bipartisan support for government-funded science and technology. The benefits were understood to be geopolitical and strategic. To support them in the private industry and the creation of wealth. And, they directly benefit the people, such as free weather forecasting.
Like scientists studying atmosphere, oceans and climate at countless institutions around the world, it is true that NOAA’s work has helped to induce several climate alarms. But that’s not because the data is surprising and the agency has an agenda other than that simple Mission Statementthe core of this is understanding, predicting and sharing knowledge with the public, and sharing its knowledge with the public.
The only radicalism working here is an attempt to reduce or destroy exquisitely valuable public assets. It is strongly rooted in the values and priorities that have made the US economy and culture the world’s vy desire.
