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An excerpt from David Lipsky’s The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial
Let’s say you’ve shipped out as a denier.
You’re in it for the action, the dollars, the travel, the fun. And you shade your eyes, glance up at a tall number: 97%, the percentage of active-duty climate researchers who accept man-made climate change.
This is what pollster Frank Luntz understood in 2002. “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming,” Luntz wrote, in his famous battle memo. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.”
And this is what was also understood by Dr. S Fred Singer and Frederick Seitz, two of the graybeard prophets who launched the global-warming skepticism movement in the 1990s, that crucial tipping point in the battle between the warmers and the deniers. A word — a concept, a percentage — was your enemy. And every six years the IPCC, the international climate science body, would stamp along on its five thousand legs and drop down another big dose of consensus. Plant it in the headlines of every newspaper. Here was the spot on the tree to carve your “X.” As you spit in your palms and lifted the axe.
Dr. Singer, an atmospheric physicist who would become one of the world’s most prominent climate deniers, tried twice. The anti-consensus petitions have names: The Leipzig Declaration, the Heidelberg Appeal. They sound like spy movies: lovelorn and crestfallen thrillers starring a tongue-tied Jason Bourne, about the cities where he tried to make his feelings known.
The appeal came first, in 1992. Dr. Singer and an associate helped arrange a conference in Heidelberg, Germany. Scientists were invited to sign a petition.
At first, Dr. Singer called it a “statement.” Time passed, coasts cleared. And he was like a man alone at the breakfast bar, filling his plate. Dr. Singer called it “strongly worded.” Said the appeal “expressed skepticism on the urgency for global action to restrict greenhouse-gas emissions.” That it “urged statesmen to go slow on climate-change policies.”
As it happens, the Heidelberg Appeal never once mentions global warming. It’s very pro-science. It’s just not at all anti-climate science.
But it was a list of science names and got weaponized anyway. When denial Senator James Inhofe quoted the petition in Congress, this is how the message ran. “The Heidelberg Appeal, which says that no compelling evidence exists to justify controls of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. They agree it is a hoax.” Two possibilities: Either the senator had never read the appeal, or he hoped you hadn’t.
Dr. Singer took a firmer hand on the next go-round. New and improved — now with global warming.
This was 1995. Earlier that year, Dr. Singer had sent a fossil fuel company his prospectus. For a very reasonable $95,000, the scientist promised to help “stem the tide towards ever more onerous controls on energy use.”
His hook was ozone. The spray cans that had been phased out, Dr. Singer explained, “all on the basis of quite insubstantial science.”
So if funds were provided “without delay,” Dr. Singer could deliver: an event, a panel, and a round number — “a Statement of Support by a hundred or more climate scientists.” With the Singer specialty: “This Statement could then be quoted or reprinted in newspapers.”
I don’t know whether Dr. Singer ever secured his funding. But that November, a panel did convene: in Leipzig, Germany. And one year later, his Statement did appear: the Leipzig Declaration. With the promised one hundred signatures.
The names crinkled brows. (Harvard’s John Holdren, later science advisor to the Obama White House, wrote of them as a mirage or the dream you reconstruct over breakfast: the list “dissolves under scrutiny.”) Sleuths from Danish Broadcasting attempted to track down the 33 European signers. Four could not be located. Twelve denied signing or even knowing about any Leipzig Declaration. Three were offended to hear their names were associated with it. The Statement had also been signed by dentists, lab techs, engineers, and one off-course entomologist who landed briefly on the page.
But the Leipzig Declaration packed its bags and coast-to-coasted anyway — from the Wall Street Journal to the Orange County Register, migrating also to Canada, London, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand. “It is widely cited by conservative voices,” write journalists Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. “And is regarded in some circles as the gold standard of scientific expertise on the issue.”
Dr. Singer identifed a hardy, Band of Brothers spirit among his “one hundred climate scientists.” As he explained in the Wall Street Journal, “It takes a certain amount of courage to do this.”
What it didn’t necessarily take was a degree in science. Florida’s Saint Petersburg Times ran their Leipzig story on the front page. Because (a) Florida, sea level. And (b), one signer was a local, the weather guy over at Tampa Bay’s WTVT. Who lacked “a Ph.D. in any scientific field,” the paper noted. “Or, for that matter, a bachelor’s.”
Dr. Singer had met his quota by reaching out to these sportscasters of the air. Twenty-five weathermen signed in, a big klatch from the state of Ohio. This included Richard Groeber, owner and operator of Dick’s Weather Service: you dialed his phone number and he told you the weather.
The Petersburg newshound dialed. Was Dick Groeber, he asked, really a scientist?
“I sort of consider myself so,” Groeber replied. “I had two or three years of training in the scientific area, and 30 or 40 years of self-study.”
The reporter brought his concerns to the keeper of the signatures, Dr. Singer. The scientist’s answer is a testament to the virtue of persistence, of keeping an eye fixed always on the prize. What was truly important, Dr. Singer said, was “the fact that we can demonstrate that 100 or so scientists would put their names down.”
And I wonder if it bothered Dr. Singer. If it’s the story of his outranked life. That for the Oregon Petition — the signature list that did go over the top — the push came from the bigger, better honored, more consequential Fred.
This article was excerpted from David Lipsky’s new book "The Parrot and the Igloo."Courtesy W.W. Norton
I don’t know who took care of the introductions. I do know S. Fred Singer sent Arthur Robinson — a biochemist, five-time Republican nominee for Oregon’s 4th congressional district, and the founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a privately funded lab — material to beef up the research paper that accompanied the Oregon Petition. And I know that the Marshall Institute —— founded by the other Fred, Dr. Seitz, the physicist and tobacco industry consultant Business Week once called the “granddaddy of global-warming skeptics” — dispatched two specialists, climate Sherpas, to lug and guide Arthur along the trickier science crevasses.
One of them was later exposed on the front page of The New York Times. Dr. Willie Soon had been the beneficiary of $1.2 million in fossil fuel largesse. The last of his dinosaur generation to find their way into the tar pits.
“In correspondence with his corporate funders,” the Times reported in 2015, Dr. Soon “described many of his scientific papers as ‘deliverables’ that he completed in exchange for their money.”
And then a beautiful single-sentence short story: capturing the whole project and spirit of denial. “Though often described on conservative news programs as a ‘Harvard astrophysicist,’ Dr. Soon is not an astrophysicist and has never been employed by Harvard.”
Arthur cowrote his paper with the two Dr. Seitz specialists, and a fellow member of the Oregon Institute faculty: his 21-year-old son, Zachary.
This father-son teamwork produced something strange. First, their paper said climate change would not occur. Then, somewhat unexpectedly, it reversed field and explained that the change was already in progress and accomplishing marvels.
Their concluding sentences drop the effort of science entirely. The language pans across streams and meadows — takes in a drowsy summer morning, with the sound of bees. “We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals,” the Robinsons write, a little dreamily, “as a result of the CO2 increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we are now blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift of the Industrial Revolution.”
Arthur’s paper had never been published or peer-reviewed. It was entirely homeschool.
And here’s where you can appreciate the great, freewheeling advantage of having fun. Arthur Robinson and Frederick Seitz collaborated on a tremendous prank.
Arthur had his report professionally printed. Now this home-cooked meal, this sloppy Joe, resembled an entrée at the end of a Food Network episode. The National Academy of Sciences produces one of the world’s most distinguished journals. Garnishing with font and layout, Robinson labored until his blessing looked, in the words of the journal Nature, “exactly like a paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
Everybody has the one résumé line they lean on. It’s whispered before you sweep over to shake hands; it will lead the obituaries when you step away forever. Frederick Seitz was the former National Academy president — publishers of the Proceedings journal whose format Arthur had copied.
Dr. Seitz wrote the letter that accompanied the Oregon Petition.
The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy. ... This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. ...We urge you to sign and return the petition card.
Dr. Seitz signed with his résumé line: Past President, The National Academy of Sciences.
A cover letter from an Academy president. A paper formatted to look exactly as if it had been published in the Academy magazine. (Plus the plural we urge, the institutional in our opinion — the speaking voice of an organization.) Arthur and Seitz had pulled off the greatest soundalike in denial history.
The package was then sent all across America — as one researcher wrote, to “virtually every scientist in every field.” And how could recipients fail to believe, tearing open their envelopes, that the Academy was reaching out to them, at an hour of scientific need?
In 1996, Nature had written about the “dwindling band of skeptics.” You picture palm fronds and breakers, the shoreline from Lord of the Flies: a rocky atoll among rising seas.
This line vexed deniers. It so bugged S. Fred Singer he ascribed it, for ease of attack, to Al Gore. (The scientist loved to attack the vice president.). So the other aim of the petition: to grow the movement, at least in the eyes of key readerships in the Washington metro area.
It really was their weakness: Demographics. Max Planck once made an ice-eyed observation about scientific change. It doesn’t result from fresh evidence, or the Kevlar argument. Positions get too dug in for that. It steals on gradually, in calendars and gravesides. “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,” the physicist wrote. “But rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
The plain truth was the deniers weren’t getting any younger. Actual science was drawing the young PhDs. (When S. Fred Singer addressed a roomful of such climatologists in the spring of the Oregon Petition, the reception was not hostile. It was charity. His audience “politely pointed to datasets and to scientific research,” wrote science journalist Myanna Lahsen, “none of which Dr. Singer appeared to be familiar with.”) It’s why the great denial work was brought off by Frederick Seitz, 86, and S. Fred Singer, 78; and by Arthur Robinson, aged 56, whose footsteps two-time Nobel Prize laureate Linus Pauling had long ago banished from institutional hallways.
“What will happen is clear,” Arthur told supporters, in a sort of pre-invasion essay, as his envelopes mustered at the post office. “The warmers will be deprived of the central pillar that underlies their entire campaign.”
This was that tall, shade-throwing word: consensus. “Remove their facade of scientific consensus, and they will likely lose — if it is removed in time.”
And it worked. In the House and Senate, lawmakers said the petition proved climate change was “bogus” — a non-issue for “the vast majority” of scientists. (They needed something like it to be true. So they went ahead and believed it into truth.) It worked because it’s a big library, and we’re all busy people. And, as the bibliothecary Jorge Luis Borges once observed, “The person does not exist who, outside their own specialty, is not credulous.”
“Happy Earth Day, Al Gore!” Fred Singer wrote in his Washington Times column. “Your much-touted ‘scientific consensus’ on global warming has just been exposed as phony.” They’d finally found a way to bring down the tree.
In 2001, Scientific American went through Arthur Robinson’s signature books. Present on Arthur’s list were names submitted in a spirit of substitute-teacher abuse. (Arthur told the Associated Press that he had “no way of filtering out a fake.”) There was Shirl E. Cook and Richard Cool and Dr. House, and the presumably dependable Knight and the presumably less steady Dr. Red Wine, also the accommodating Betty Will, the in-terrible-distress W. C. Lust. Also someone who gave their name only as Looney. Plus a dash of celebrity like Michael J. Fox and John Grisham and the dramatis personae of the medical series M*A*S*H. Even some businesses, like R. C. Kannan & Associates, and Glenn Springs Holdings, Inc., had found a way to lift the pen and get involved. Dick Groeber — Dick’s Weather Service — had once again elected to lend the effort the weight of his endorsement. All these names appeared on Arthur’s petition as it was cited in Congress.
Arthur claimed only one false name was ever found to soil his list. (Some jokester had snuck on Dr. Geri Halliwell — Ginger Spice, of the empowerment band Spice Girls.) But post-media, all these names were quietly withdrawn. W. C. Lust and Betty Will and Glenn Springs Holdings, Inc., and Dick’s Weather Service, scrubbed from history.
The names Scientific American examined were real. Barrier to entry was not high. If you claimed a bachelor’s in math, science, or engineering, to Arthur’s way of thinking you were a climate scientist. (Even so, Dick Groeber had no real business being on this list.) Your kid’s math teacher could sign. So could her shop teacher, and the veterinarian.
These names were Styrofoam peanuts, packaging, and brushed aside. Scientific American took “a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science.”
Of the 26 names they could identify through the databases, “11 said they still agreed with the petition.” The magazine went on, “One was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages.” The magazine estimated that Arthur had managed about 200 climate researchers — “a small fraction of the climatological community.” Remove number from box, shake off the packaging: What Arthur Robinson and Frederick Seitz had delivered was a sweaty means of confirming the consensus.
And still there were international headlines (“NO SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS ON GLOBAL WARMING”). And still Frederick Seitz and S. Fred Singer could make their use of the data.
Dr. Seitz told reporters the petition represented “the silent majority of the scientific community.” (Which meant at least 51 laconic percent.) And Dr. Singer called it “the largest group of scientists ever,” as if the petition combined a Caltech homecoming weekend with an especially congested Burning Man.
Arthur kept up the petition drive. Yet among supporters, he couldn’t quite bring himself to call the signers colleagues. The tongue values what it values.
“We’ve got now about 17,000 scien—” Arthur caught himself. “People with degrees in science.” As of 2008, he’d nearly doubled his figure.
S. Fred Singer experienced the same performance trouble. In 2012 he was still quoting it. Because it was the only thing — Arthur had given the movement the strongest evidence it ever had. But even the famously reliable Singer tongue went rogue. “There’s hundreds of us — thousands,” he said on PBS. “Look, 31,000 scientists and engineers signed a statement.” Then the scientist went a bit green. “Look, they’re not specialists in climate.”
But in 1998, when the ground was fresh, Dr. Singer told Congress that signers were “specialists in fields related to global warming.” He told readers, while the issue was being contested, they were “experts in the pertinent scientific fields.”
Arthur’s website gives his patriotic side of the figure. “31,487 American scientists,” he writes. “Including 9,029 Ph.D.s.” You needed a data point, a comparison.
So, for the doctoral number: America is home to half a million science and engineering PhDs. Arthur netted 1.8%. His yield was small. And for the bachelor’s number: We’ve awarded 10 million first degrees in science and engineering. Here Arthur’s petition was an absolute crash: 0.3%.
Arthur again sounded the Academy horn in a press release. “More than 40 signatories are members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.” But Arthur had withheld the comparison. The Academy’s got 2,200 members. His yield was eerily consistent: 1.8%. The generally accepted number for climate scientists and warming is 97% to 3%. Arthur’s fate was to spend 25 years as superintendent of a consensus he loathed.
This article was excerpted and condensed from David Lipsky’s book The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial, available now from W. W. Norton & Company ©2023.
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Tesla already looked beleaguered last week as a tumbling stock price tied to public anger at CEO Elon Musk wiped out more than a half-billion dollars in value. The slide erased all the gains the company had garnered since new Musk ally Donald Trump was reelected as president. On Monday the stock went into full freefall, losing 15% of its value in one day. By Tuesday, Trump had to pose with Tesla vehicles outside the White House to try to defend them.
With a crashing market valuation and rising rage against its figurehead, Tesla’s business is in real jeopardy, something that’s true regardless of Musk’s power in the federal government. If he can’t magically right the ship this time, this self-sabotaging MAGA turn will go down as one of the great self-owns.
Musk’s heel turn has also upended EV culture and meaning. Tesla ownership, once a signal of climate virtue for those who bought in early, has been rebranded as a badge of shame. I’m annoyed that a vehicle I chose for the purpose of not burning fossil fuels has become a political albatross, and that many drivers are resorting to self-flagellating bumper stickers in the hopes it will stop vandals from spray-painting their doors. I wish I knew then what we know now, of course. But what would have become of the EV revolution if we had?
When, exactly, we should have seen Elon’s true self is a question that will inspire countless arguments amid the wave of Tesla hate. Signs were there early. By 2018, before the Model 3 even hit the road, Musk had been hit by so much criticism of his bad tweets and weird behavior that the magazine I worked for at the time felt the need to publish a contrarian defense of him as just the kind of risk-taking innovator the world needs.
That angle aged like milk, but within it lay a few grains of truth. Tesla truly did the bulk of the work in transforming the image of the electric car from a dumpy potato that only climate advocates would ever own, like the original Nissan Leaf, into a desirable consumer product. This is the company’s signature achievement, one that kickstarted the widespread adoption of EVs.
As I’ve written before, Musk wasn’t exactly untainted by 2019, when I bought my own Model 3. The Tony Stark luster of the new space age entrepreneur had worn off as the man sullied himself with pointless “pedo guy” accusations leveled at a rescuer in the Thailand cave incident. But the man had the best electric vehicle on the market, and more importantly, the best charging network. Having just moved to Los Angeles and in need of a vehicle, I wanted an EV to be my family’s only car. Without a home charger in the apartment, I simply couldn’t have lived with a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona EV and the inferior charging networks they relied on at the time.
Millions of people who bought Teslas between then and now made the same choice. Some did it because a Tesla became a status symbol; many others were like me, simply interested in the most practical EV they could get. The ascendance of the Model Y to the world’s best-selling car of any kind in 2023 — a fact that feels astonishing in this flood of horrible vibes and MAGA antagonism just two years later — turned countless people into EV drivers.
After Musk’s far-right reveal, sales are tanking in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and other places that just saw a Tesla boom. Many owners, at least those with the financial wherewithal to buy a new car based on the prevailing political winds, are trying to unload their Musk-affiliated vehicles.
All those people in search of a new ride have a much better selection of electric vehicles to choose from than I did in 2019, which, weirdly, is thanks to the legacy carmakers and new EV startups that raced to catch up to Tesla. If I hadn’t bought a Model 3 in 2019, I would’ve had to get a hybrid and keep burning gasoline. If you want to avoid Musk in 2025, there are great Hyundai, Chevrolet, and other EVs waiting for you.
This isn’t to say there’s no alternate history where electric vehicles take off without Tesla. It didn’t invent the EV. Other automakers were experimenting with EVs before Musk’s company took off and conquered the market, and government environmental goals pushed carmakers toward electrification. Yet it’s hard to argue we’d be where we are now, with tens of millions of EVs on the world’s roads, without the meteoric rise of Musk’s car brand.
It stinks, simply put, to say anything nice about Tesla now, even if one is stating facts. Yes, Musk’s success buoyed electrification on multiple fronts: selling tons of EVs, forcing the other automakers to get serious about their electrification goals, and building a charging network that let his vehicles go just about anywhere a gas car would go. It also made him the world’s richest man, giving him the resources to buy and ruin Twitter and then help Trump get re-elected and undo federal policy support for the very cars he helped popularize. He made the world a better place for a moment, then ruined it because he could.
As an EV advocate, I can’t ignore the fact that Tesla got us to here. But as a human, I eagerly await the time Musk’s company no longer dominates the market it created. Thank goodness, that time seems to be coming soon.
On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
And how ordinary Americans will pay the price.
No one seems to know exactly how many employees have been laid off from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — or, for that matter, what offices those employees worked at, what jobs they held, or what regions of the country will be impacted by their absence. We do know that it was a lot of people; about 10% of the roughly 13,000 people who worked at the agency have left since Donald Trump took office, either because they were among the 800 or so probationary employees to be fired late last month or because they resigned.
“I don’t have the specifics as to which offices, or how many people from specific geographic areas, but I will reiterate that every one of the six [NOAA] line offices and 11 of the staff offices — think of the General Counsel’s Office or the Legislative Affairs Office — all 11 of those staff offices have suffered terminations,” Rick Spinrad, who served as the NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden, told reporters in a late February press call. (At least a few of the NOAA employees who were laid off have since been brought back.)
Democratic Representative Jared Huffman of California, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in recent comments about the NOAA layoffs, “This is going to have profound negative consequences on the day-to-day lives of Americans.” He added, “This is something that [Elon Musk’s government efficiency team] just doesn’t even understand. They simply have no idea what they are doing and how it’s hurting people.”
There is the direct harm to hard-working employees who have lost their jobs, of course. But there is also a more existential problem: Part of what is driving the layoffs is a belief by those in power that the agency is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” according to the Project 2025 playbook. As one recently fired NOAA employee put it, “the goal is destruction,” and climate science is one of the explicit targets.
NOAA is a multifaceted organization, and monitoring climate change is far from its only responsibility. The agency researches, protects, and restores America’s fisheries, including through an enforcement arm that combats poaching; it explores the deep ocean and governs seabed mining; and its Commissioned Officer Corps is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States, alongside the Army, Marines Corps, and Coast Guard. But many of its well-known responsibilities almost inevitably touch climate change, from the National Hurricane Center’s forecasts and warnings to drought tools for farmers to heat forecasts from the National Weather Service issued on hot summer days. Cutting climate science out of NOAA would have immediate — and in some cases, deadly — impacts on regular Americans.
And it’s likely this is only the beginning of the purge. Project 2025 calls for the complete disbanding of NOAA. Current agency employees have reportedly been told to brace for “a 50% reduction in staff” as part of Elon Musk’s government efficiency campaign. Another 1,000 terminations are expected this week, bringing the total loss at NOAA to around 20% of its staff.
Here are just a few of the ways those layoffs are already impacting climate science.
NOAA collects more than 20 terabytes of environmental data from Earth and space daily, and through its paleoclimatology arm, it has reconstructed climate data going back 100 million years. Not even Project 2025 calls for the U.S. to halt its weather measurements entirely; in fact, Congress requires the collection of a lot of standard climate data.
But the NOAA layoffs are hampering those data collection efforts, introducing gaps and inconsistencies. For example, staffing shortages have resulted in the National Weather Service suspending weather balloon launches from Kotzebue, Alaska — and elsewhere — “indefinitely.” The Trump administration is also considering shuttering a number of government offices, including several of NOAA’s weather monitoring stations. Repairs of monitors and sensors could also be delayed by staff cuts and funding shortfalls — or not done at all.
Flawed and incomplete data results in degraded and imprecise forecasts. In an era of extreme weather, the difference of a few miles or degrees can be a matter of life or death.
In the case of climate science specifically, which looks at changes over much longer timescales than meteorology, “I think you could do science with the data we have now, if we can preserve it,” Flavio Lehner, a climate scientist at Cornell University who uses NOAA data in his research, told me.
But therein lies the next problem: the threat that the government could take NOAA climate data down entirely.
Though data collection is in many cases mandated by Congress, Congress does not require that the public have access to that data. Though NOAA’s climate page is still live, the Environmental Protection Agency has already removed from its website the Keeling Curve tracker, the daily global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration measurement that Drilled notes is “one of the longest-running data projects in climate science.” Many other government websites that reference climate change have also gone dark. Solutions are complicated — “downloading” NOAA to preserve it, for example, would cost an estimated $500,000 in storage per month for an institution to host it.
“At the end of the day, if you’re a municipality or a community and you realize that some of these extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, you’ll want to adapt to it, whether you think it’s because of climate change or not,” Lehner said. “People want to have the best available science to adapt, and I think that applies to Republicans and Democrats and all kinds of communities across the country.” But if the Trump administration deletes NOAA websites, or the existing measurements it’s putting out are of poor quality, “it’s not going to be the best possible science to adapt moving forward,” Lehner added.
I wouldn’t want to be a NOAA scientist with the word “climate” attached to my title or work. The Trump administration has shown itself to be ruthless in eliminating references to words or concepts it opposes, including flagging pictures of the Enola Gay WWII airplane for removal from the Defense Department’s website in an effort to cut all references to the LGBT community from the agency.
“Climate science” is another Trump administration boogey-word, but the NOAA scientists who remain employed by the agency after the layoffs will still have to deal with the realities of a world warmed by the burning of fossil fuels. “Ultimately, what we’re dealing with are changes in our environment that impact ecosystems and humans, and whether you think these changes are driven by humans or not, it’s something that can now be seen in data,” Lehner told me. “From that perspective, I find it hard to believe that this is not something that people [in the government] are interested in researching.”
Government scientists who want to track things like drought or the rapid intensification of hurricanes going forward will likely have to do so without using the word “climate.” Lehner, for example, recalled submitting a proposal to work with the Bureau of Reclamation on the climate change effects on the Colorado River during the first Trump administration and being advised to replace words like “climate change” with more politically neutral language. His team did, and the project ultimately got funded, though Lehner couldn’t say if that was only because of the semantics. It seems likely, though, that Trump 2.0 will be even stricter in CTRL + F’ing “climate” at NOAA and elsewhere.
Climate research will continue in some form at NOAA, if only because that’s the reality of working with data of a warming planet. But scientists who don’t lose their jobs in the layoffs will likely find themselves wasting time on careful doublespeak so as not to attract unwanted attention.
Another major concern with the NOAA layoffs is the loss of expert knowledge. Many NOAA offices were already lean and understaffed, and only one or two employees likely knew how to perform certain tasks or use certain programs. If those experts subsequently lose their jobs, decades of NOAA know-how will be lost entirely.
As one example, late last year, NOAA updated its system to process grants, causing delays as its staff learned how to use the new program. Given the new round of layoffs, the odds are that some of the employees who may have finally figured out how to navigate the new procedure may have been let go. The problem gets even worse when it comes to specialized knowledge.
“Some of the expertise in processing [NOAA’s] data has been abruptly lost,” Lehner told me. “The people who are still there are scrambling to pick up and learn how to process that data so that it can then be used again.”
The worst outcome of the NOAA layoffs, though, is the extensive damage it does to the institution’s future. Some of the brightest, most enthusiastic Americans at NOAA — the probationary employees with under a year of work — are already gone. What’s more, there aren’t likely to be many new openings at the agency for the next generation of talent coming up in high school and college right now.
“We have an atmospheric science program [at Cornell University] where students have secured NOAA internships for this summer and were hoping to have productive careers, for example, at the National Weather Service, and so forth,” Lehner said. “Now, all of this is in question.”
That is hugely detrimental to NOAA’s ability to preserve the institutional knowledge of outgoing or retiring employees, or to build and advance a workforce of the future. It’s impossible to measure how many people ultimately leave the field or decide to pursue a different career because of the changes at NOAA — damage that will not be easily reversed under a new administration. “It’s going to take years for NOAA to recover the trust of the next generation of brilliant environmental scientists and policymakers,” Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator, said.
Climate change is a global problem, and NOAA has historically worked with partner agencies around the world to better understand the impacts of the warming planet. Now, however, the Trump administration has ordered NOAA employees to stop their international work, and employees who held roles that involved collaboration with partners abroad could potentially become targets of Musk’s layoffs. Firing those employees would also mean severing their relationships with scientists in international offices — offices that very well could have been in positions to help protect U.S. citizens with their research and data.
As the U.S. continues to isolate itself and the NOAA layoffs continue, there will be cascading consequences for climate science, which is inherently a collaborative field. “When the United States doesn’t lead [on climate science], two things happen,” Craig McLean, a former assistant administrator of NOAA for research, recently told the press. “Other nations relax their own spending in these areas, and the world’s level of understanding starts to decline,” and “countries who we may not have as collegial an understanding with,” such as China, could ostensibly step in and “replace the United States and its leadership.”
That leaves NOAA increasingly alone, and Americans of all political stripes will suffer as a result. “The strategy to erase data and research, to pull the rug from under activism — it’s time-tested,” Lehner, the Cornell climate scientist, said. “But that’s where it’s very infuriating because NOAA’s data is bipartisanly useful.”