White House Proposal Could Gut Climate Modeling the World Depends On
by Abrahm Lustgarten
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Over the past two months, the Trump administration has taken steps to eliminate regulations addressing climate change, pull back funding for climate programs and cancel methods used to evaluate how climate change is affecting American society and its economy. Now it is directly undermining the science and research of climate change itself, in ways that some of the nation’s most distinguished scientists say will have dangerous consequences.
Proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency whose weather and climate research touches almost every facet of American life, are targeting a 57-year-old partnership between Princeton University and the U.S. government that produces what many consider the world’s most advanced climate modeling and forecasting systems. NOAA’s work extends deep into the heart of the American economy — businesses use it to navigate risk and find opportunity — and it undergirds both American defense and geopolitical planning. The possible elimination of the lab, called the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in concert with potential cuts to other NOAA operations, threatens irreparable harm not only to global understanding of climate change and long-range scenarios for the planet but to the country’s safety, competitiveness and national security.
The gutting of NOAA was outlined earlier this month in a leaked memo from the Office of Management and Budget that detailed steep reductions at the Department of Commerce, which houses the science agency. The memo, which was viewed by ProPublica, has been previously reported. But the full implications of those cuts for the nation’s ability to accurately interpret dynamic changes in the planet’s weather and to predict long-term warming scenarios through its modeling arm in Princeton have not.
According to the document, NOAA’s overall funding would be slashed by 27%, eliminating “functions of the Department that are misaligned with the President’s agenda and the expressed will of the American people” including almost all of those related to the study of climate change. The proposal would break up and significantly defund the agency across programs, curtailing everything from ocean research to coastal management while shifting one of NOAA’s robust satellite programs out of the agency and putting another up for commercial bidding. But its most significant target is the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research ⎯ a nerve center of global climate science, data collection and modeling, including the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory ⎯ which would be cut by 74%. “At this funding level, OAR is eliminated as a line office,” the memo stated.
The total loss of OAR and its crown jewel in Princeton represents a setback for climate preparedness that experts warn the nation may never recover from.
“If we don’t understand what’s happening and why it’s happening, you can’t be adapting, you can’t be resilient. You’re just going to suffer,” Don Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist who sits on NOAA’s scientific advisory board, told ProPublica. “We’re going to see huge impacts on infrastructure and lives lost in the U.S.”
There are other national climate models, but they also appear to be in jeopardy of losing funding. The National Science Foundation supports the National Center for Atmospheric Research, but the foundation announced it was freezing all research grants on April 18. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has a model, but the institute could see cuts of up to 47%. And the Department of Energy, home to a fourth climate modeling system, is also under budget pressure.
Without the models, and all the sensor networks and supporting NOAA research programs that feed them, “We’ll go back to the technical and proficiency levels we had in the 1950s,” said Craig McLean, a 40-year veteran of NOAA who, until 2022, was the agency’s top administrator for research and its acting chief scientist. “We won’t have the tools we have today because we can’t populate them by people or by data.”
Neither the Department of Commerce nor NOAA responded to lists of emailed questions, including whether the agencies had appealed the OMB’s proposal before the April 12 deadline to do so or whether NOAA has prepared a plan to implement the changes, which is due by April 24. OMB also did not respond to a request for comment.
Princeton and NOAA together built America’s global supremacy in weather and climate science over generations. After World War II, the United States refocused its scientific superiority ⎯ and its early computing capabilities ⎯ on understanding how the weather and the planet works. The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory was established in 1955 and moved to Princeton in 1968. Under NOAA, which was established by President Richard Nixon in 1970, the lab advanced early forecasting, using sensors in the oceans and the sky. It developed theories for how fluids and gases interact and came to understand that the oceans and the atmosphere drive weather ⎯ what today has become known as climate science.
The GFDL’s models, including the first hurricane model, became the basis for both short-term weather outlooks and longer-range forecasts, or climate prediction, which soon became one and the same. Those models now form the underlying modeling architecture of many of NOAA’s other departments, including the forecasts from the National Weather Service. The GFDL has trained many of the world’s best climate scientists, who are leading the most prestigious research in Japan, the U.K. and Germany, and in 2021 an alumnus of its staff won the Nobel Prize in physics. The U.S. agencies periodically run their models in competition, and last time they did, the GFDL’s models came out ahead. The lab is “the best that there is,” McLean said. “It’s really a stunningly impressive and accomplished place. It is a gem. It is the gem.”
Today the GFDL works in partnership with Princeton researchers to produce a series of models that have proven extraordinarily accurate in forecasting how the planet is changing when their past predictions are tested against past events. The GFDL models formed the basis of NOAA’s Hurricane Weather Research Forecast model that almost exactly foretold the extraordinary and unprecedented rainfall near Houston during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 — the model predicted 45 inches of rain, the final total was 48 inches. The GFDL models are working to incorporate once-elusive factors, like large-scale methane emissions from melting permafrost, and are increasingly understanding the role of changing currents and warming ocean temperatures in driving rapid storm intensification of hurricanes like Milton and Helene. Every May the lab delivers an updated model to the National Hurricane Center, which uses it to produce the center’s annual forecast for the following season of storms.
It is not yet clear what the potential loss of the GFDL and the databases and sensors that support it might mean. Funding cuts could merely hobble the lab’s staff and prevent the model from ever being advanced, or its operations could be shut down entirely, the responsibility perhaps passed on to another agency’s models. What is clear, McLean and others point out, is that even the degradation of American climate prediction capabilities poses significant risks to the U.S. economy, to national security and to the country’s leverage in the world.
NOAA makes its data ⎯ from ocean buoy and satellite readings to the outputs from the GFDL models ⎯ free to the public, where it constitutes a certified base layer of information that is picked up not only by American policymakers, regulators and planners but also by scientists around the world and by industries, which use it to gain a competitive advantage. A 2024 study by the American Meteorological Society found that NOAA’s weather forecasts alone ⎯ which use parts of the GFDL models and represent just a tiny fraction of the agency’s data production ⎯ generate more than $73 in savings for every dollar invested in them.
The data that drives those forecasts informs the calculations for an untold number of property insurance policies in the country, helping to channel billions of dollars in aid to home and business owners in the aftermath of natural disasters. All three of the major U.S. insurance catastrophe modelers build their assessments at least in part using NOAA data. Munich Re, the global reinsurance giant backing many American property insurers, depends on it, and Swiss Re, a second reinsurance powerhouse, also routinely cites NOAA in its reports.
The shipping industry charts its courses, plans its fuel use and avoids disaster using NOAA climate and weather forecasts, while NOAA data on water levels and currents is relied on to manage the channels and ports used by those ships, which carry a sizeable portion of global trade, generating trillions of dollars in economic activity each year. The trucking industry, too, saves upward of $3 billion in fuel costs based on idling guidelines that apply NOAA temperature data. It is equally important for farmers and large agricultural corporations, which rely on NOAA’s seasonal and long-range precipitation forecasts to make strategic planting decisions. NOAA’s chief economists estimate that the agency’s El Nino outlooks alone boost the U.S. agricultural economy by $300 million a year, and that corn growers save as much as $4 billion in fertilizer and cleanup costs based on optimizing to NOAA forecasts.
Developers and homebuilders rely on NOAA data to determine coastal flooding risk and to schedule work. The Federal Aviation Administration is using new NOAA models to develop its next-generation air traffic management system. And the banks and financial corporations that depend on the healthy functioning of these other industries know this. Morgan Stanley uses NOAA climate data to assess risk to the economy across multiple sectors. As does J.P. Morgan, whose top science adviser is a former NOAA scientist who once worked directly with the climate modeling program at the GFDL.
The secretary of commerce himself, Howard Lutnick, endorsed the importance of climate science when he was the CEO and chair of the global Wall Street investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which characterized climate change as “the defining issue of our time.” In the same report, the company wrote that “Scientific evidence indicates that if left unchecked, climate change will be disastrous and life threatening.” The report went on to state that those changes could offer “a unique investment opportunity” but also “presents a challenge to our investments.”
A spokesperson for Cantor Fitzgerald did not respond to a question about whether the firm’s assessment was based on NOAA data, but McLean asserts that it likely was because NOAA and the GFDL’s data represents “the roots of every climate model in the world.”
Perhaps this is why Lutnick, when asked by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., during his confirmation hearing in January whether he believed in keeping NOAA and its core scientific responsibilities together, declared that he did. “I have no interest in separating it. That is not on my agenda,” Lutnick told her. When asked again, 30 minutes later, by Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, whether he agreed with the Project 2025 goal that NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated,” Lutnick was again explicit: “No”
Yet after the NOAA budget documents were leaked and the threats to GFDL became clear, Lutnick’s office targeted even more climate-related programs, announcing the suspension of $4 million in grants to a separate but related program at Princeton that includes its Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System, a research effort run in conjunction with the GFDL, and that provides some of the core staffing and research for the lab. “This cooperative agreement promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as climate anxiety,” his office wrote in an April 8 press release from the Department of Commerce. “Its focus on alarming climate scenarios fosters fear rather than rational, balanced discussion.”
Princeton University did not respond to emailed questions.
The potential loss of the world’s greatest climate forecasting tool has other ramifications for long-term safety and security. NOAA’s climate modeling systems ⎯ in combination with other national climate models at the National Science Foundation, NASA and elsewhere ⎯ help the Defense Department to run its operations and to anticipate and prepare for emerging threats.
NOAA models and data generate the actionable weather forecasts for operational planning in conflict theaters like the Middle East. Its measurements of ocean salinity and temperatures inform Navy operations, according to the Council on Strategic Risks, a nonpartisan security policy institute in Washington. It contributes to the forecast data for Air Force strike planning and Army troop movement. Its long-range climate forecasts are core to the Defense Department’s five-year planning for each of its global Geographic Combatant Commands that divide jurisdiction for U.S. forces around the world, according to a Rand report.
Without this information, warned Rod Schoonover, a former State Department analyst and director of environment and natural resources within the office of the director of national intelligence, the U.S. surrenders its superiority in projecting all kinds of security concerns, including not only threats to its own facilities and operations but also cascading power failures or extreme heatwaves and sudden food price spikes that can lead to destabilization and conflict around the world. “This is a foundational degradation in our intelligence capabilities,” said Schoonover, the founder and CEO of the Ecological Futures Group. “There is a profoundly changed and heightened threat if the U.S. can no longer rely on its own premier, ‘homegrown’ climate forecasts for strategic and operational decisions.
“Why would any U.S. administration choose to forfeit this vital strategic edge?”
