Opinion
For more than 50 years, NOAA has pioneered climate research and been instrumental in advancing modern weather forecasting. Now labeled by Project 2025 as part of the “climate alarm industry” and facing DOGE-driven cuts, the future of this valuable public asset is in jeopardy.
A couple of weeks ago, an extremely bright and capable young scientist I know was terminated from her job at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), in Princeton, New Jersey. I had met her around five years ago, when she was a graduate student, and stayed in touch with her through her subsequent postdoctoral appointment. She had started at GFDL last fall and was on probationary status as a new federal employee. Ten scientists with that status were fired from GFDL that day, part of around a thousand let go from NOAA altogether. NOAA has since been instructed by the Trump administration to fire another thousand as part of a “reduction in force,” the two rounds together totaling around twenty percent of NOAA’s personnel. It’s not clear if it will stop there.
Every scientist in the world who studies the atmosphere or ocean knows the name of GFDL, and most likely the names of some of its scientists, past or present. 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, made his career there.
Far from being a left-wing activist organization, NOAA has been part of the military-industrial complex from the start.
When I was an assistant professor at Columbia University in the early 2000s, I regularly traveled from New York City down to Princeton to visit Isaac Held. A former student of Manabe’s, Held is one of our field’s most brilliant and influential scientists and a mentor to many climate scientists working today. The GFDL building, on a quiet satellite campus of Princeton University, is an unglamorous black glass-and-steel cube, but it was magic to walk its halls. As a young scientist seeking insight into the complexities of the atmosphere’s planetary-scale turbulence, I felt I was at the center of the world, and in a sense I was.
While GFDL is most famous for its work on climate, the lab has also played a central role in weather forecasting. NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), based in Maryland, generates predictions for the National Weather Service by running a suite of computer models. These models have so-called dynamical cores — the guts that determine how the model’s simulated atmosphere moves from one moment to the next — that were developed at GFDL. (In early March, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency included the building that houses EMC on a list of federal leases that would be canceled, and its status is now unclear.)
In fact, modern weather forecasting itself started in Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Study, in the years just after World War II. Digital computers were new, and leading physicist and mathematician John von Neumann realized that weather prediction was a good problem for these new machines to tackle. He put together a team of the best atmospheric scientists, led by Jule Charney, to figure out how to use his new machine, called ENIAC, to solve the equations describing the physics of atmospheric motion fast enough and accurately enough to make useful forecasts. They built the first successful weather prediction models, and the U.S. Weather Bureau, now known as the National Weather Service, quickly adopted the technology.
On Charney’s team was another young scientist named Joseph Smagorinsky. (Charney and Smagorinsky were both children of East European Jewish immigrants, and von Neumann was an East European Jewish immigrant himself.) After the success of the Princeton project, Smagorinsky was hired by the U.S. Weather Bureau and placed at the helm of the newly formed General Circulation Research Section in 1955. In 1963, the section was renamed the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, which moved from Maryland to Princeton in 1968. GFDL became part of NOAA after the agency was created in 1970, and Smagorinsky led the lab until he retired in 1983.
Research at the Lamont-Doherty observatory, where El Niño prediction was pioneered, is also threatened by the Trump administration.
The current assault on NOAA appears to be a manifestation of Project 2025, which labels it “one of the main drivers of the climate alarm industry,” as though it were a left-wing activist organization. Yet the agency has been part of the military-industrial complex from the start. Von Neumann had the resources and authority to start his weather prediction project because of the work he and other physicists had done on the Manhattan Project. And from then on, the fields of meteorology, oceanography, and climate science continued to grow out of the alliance between science and the military.
Satellites, computers, and radar have all developed for both military and weather and climate science applications. Much of what we know about the ocean is a consequence of research funded by the Navy, including much done at my own institution, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, where plate tectonics and El Niño prediction were both pioneered — and which is now also threatened by the Trump administration through its current assault on Columbia University, of which Lamont is a part.
Scientists including John von Neumann, second to left, and Jule Charney, far right, used the ENIAC computer to make the first successful numerical weather prediction.
Courtesy of MIT Museum
Even the science of human-induced climate change has military roots: In the 1950s and 1960s, as the influence of carbon dioxide on temperature began to be understood, leading scientists were called to meetings with members of Congress and military generals, who wanted to understand how warming might affect geopolitics and how the U.S. might turn potential climate change to its advantage. The military has remained pragmatic about climate science, from then until just now.
The recent and planned cuts to NOAA are, as intended, profoundly threatening to climate science — at GFDL; at the Mauna Loa Observatory, the Hawaiian lab that maintains the longest record of atmospheric carbon dioxide; and elsewhere. They threaten routine weather prediction as well, as weather balloon launches are canceled and the staff needed to maintain and upgrade the models are slashed. This appears to be a feature rather than a bug, as Project 2025 calls for the privatization of weather forecasting. The business models of the many private companies that already sell weather forecasts, however, as well as countless other users in both the private and public sectors (the insurance industry, for example) depend on free NOAA data, and they don’t want it to go away. How much that matters — and to what extent the public goods that NOAA provides can or will be taken away — remains to be seen.
If NOAA’s work has induced some alarm on climate, that’s because the data are alarming, not because it has an agenda beyond its mission.
It’s not clear what point in history “Make America Great Again” refers to. But the postwar economic prosperity that older generations took for granted was built on steady, bipartisan support of government-funded science and technology. It was understood that the benefits are geopolitical and strategic; that they support private industry and the creation of wealth; and that they benefit the public directly, such as through free weather forecasts.
It’s true that NOAA’s work, like that of scientists who study the atmosphere, oceans, and climate at countless institutions around the world, has helped to induce some alarm about climate. But that’s because the data are alarming, not because the agency has any agenda other than its simple mission statement, whose core is to understand and predict changes in climate and weather, and to share that knowledge with the public.
The only radicalism at work here is the attempt to diminish or destroy an exquisitely valuable public asset — one strongly rooted in the values and priorities that made the economy and culture of the U.S. the envy of the world — simply because its mission may not be entirely consistent with the current transition to authoritarianism and oligarchy.
