Is climate science threatened as US slashes jobs, funding?

Is climate science threatened as US slashes jobs, funding?

Zachary Labe has always been fascinated by the weather. As a kid he drew pictures of it and pretended to work for the National Weather Service, giving forecasts to his parents and friends.

It was a big moment when last summer the young climate scientist landed a research position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), one of the world's most important sites of climate and weather research.

"When I say it's been my dream, I am quite honest about that," said Labe.

The dream ended abruptly last week, when Labe was one of the roughly 800 staff members fired from NOAA. His firing was part of the US administration's wider efforts to slash what US President Donald Trump calls a "bloated" federal workforce in an effort to reduce government spending.

But Labe says his personal loss pales in comparison to the implications not only to climate science around the world but the everyday lives of people in the US.
What do NOAA firings mean for the US?

What the federal agency does touches pretty much everyone in the US, said Tom Di Liberto, a public affairs specialist among those recently fired from NOAA. "Unless you live inside all the time or in a bunker somewhere, NOAA impacts you."

Its vast remit includes monitoring ocean and climate conditions and protecting endangered species. But it's also the primary source of weather data collection in the US, collecting an estimated 6.3 billion observations every day and issuing millions of forecasts and warnings each year through the National Weather Service.

Labe's work involved expanding the use of machine learning and AI to create more accurate forecasts for extreme weather — which is being supercharged around the world by climate change.
NOAA provides early warnings on approaching stormsImage: NOAA/AFP

US hurricane season starts in just a few months. Fired NOAA workers told DW they were concerned reduced staffing could impair the quality of forecasting, including early warning systems for extreme weather that save lives and lessen economic losses.

Di Liberto, who is also a climate scientist, said he wondered whether the organization could still "continue to do the things that we know can help make sure people are prepared and also save property and damages and overall help the US economy."

In 2024, extreme weather like Hurricane Helene, which devastated states such as North Carolina, caused hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars in damages in the country.
Wider repercussions for the climate

As NOAA's satellites collect data on the entire planet, reducing the agency's capacity could have wide reaching impacts, explained Di Liberto. "There's a ton of temperature data sets, ocean data sets, atmospheric data sets that are relied upon by not only United States, not only by countries in Europe, but also the private sector and industry."

Access to high quality weather data is vital for guiding governments in making decisions and investments to protect their citizens, said Florence Rabier, director general at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. "The weather knows no border, and to successfully predict the weather over one area, data is needed from across the globe."

Several industries — including aviation, agriculture, fishing, insurance and construction — rely on NOAA's weather and climate modeling. It's seen as essential in understanding how the climate crisis is unfolding not only in the US but around the world.

"It is certainly going to be disruptive," said Linwood Pendleton, a senior researcher at the European Institute of Marine Studies at the University of Western Brittany in France, of the wider impacts NOAA losses may have to climate science. "I think it's going to be felt immediately in international collaborative projects where NOAA was footing a lot of the bill."
Climate change is supercharging extreme weather, like the LA wildfires in JanuaryImage: ETIENNE LAURENT/AFP/Getty Images

The NOAA layoffs are just one element of a dramatic pushback against climate policy and science since Donald Trump — who has called climate change a "hoax" and vowed to expand oil and gas production — has reentered office.

In his speech to Congress on Tuesday, he said he was removing environmental and climate protections that harm the economy, cost jobs and make the country "totally unaffordable."

In the past weeks, employees have also been fired en masse from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, federal grants have been withheld, fossil fuel projects are set to be boosted, approvals for wind power halted, and references to climate change have been scrubbed from several federal agency websites.

Fearing the loss of climate information vital to scientific work all around the world, some researchers are preemptively downloading and cataloguing datasets.

Di Liberto believes it is going to become more difficult for scientists working with the US government to travel abroad and collaborate with their peers on climate modeling. "There is going to be less communication between the United States and Europe, which is going to lead to there being just less knowledge developed."

Where to next for climate science?

An open letter to Congress and the Trump administration signed by more than 2,500 scientists argued the dismantling of NOAA and other leading scientific institutions would amount to an "abdication of US leadership in climate science" in which it plays an outsized role.

Last week, the administration stopped NASA's chief scientist from attending a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in China. The UN body is responsible for producing the world's leading assessments of climate change and its consequences for humanity, which is used by governments around the world to guide policy.
US President Donald Trump has promised to expand fossil fuel projectsImage: AP Photo/Alex Brandon/picture alliance

This could have an immense impact given the significance of US science in driving IPCC work, said Anna-Katharina Hornidge, director of the German Institute of Development and Sustainability, a Bonn-based think tank.

When it comes to the question of who might be able to fill a void left by the US "my hope lies with Europe to some degree," said Hornidge. She said the creativity, mobility and motivation of many climate scientists themselves was also a reason to be optimistic.

Labe thinks many scientists will now be tempted to leave the US and pursue research elsewhere. He said he has received many offers already in Europe.

But Hornidge added that climate-skeptic parties are moving into government not only in the US but on all continents, despite the urgency of the crisis.

Last year was the hottest on record, and scientists say rapid action is needed to reduce emissions and keep global heating under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). That is the only way to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. The world is currently on track for over 3 C warming by the end of this century.

On his first day as president, Trump pulled the US for the second time out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the international treaty calling on governments to limit global warming.

Even if the US now takes a backseat, the rest of the world needs to keep going and "know that there is a huge amount of people in the country who are still working on it and care about this topic," said Di Liberto.

Without climate science or with gaps in it, the world won't be able to predict the future or understand the increasing risks coming our way, continued Di Liberto. "It'd be like driving a car blindfolded and then hoping you stay on the road."