UCAR Sues Trump Administration Over Planned Closure of Federally Funded National Center for Atmospheric Research

Inside Climate News reported that the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research filed the suit making those claims. Waleed Abdalati is the former NASA chief scientist. He is now a professor and the director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

“The Arctic is changing more rapidly than other places on Earth,” Abdalati told Curwood. Understanding those processes, he added, helps determine investments, economic opportunities from shrinking ice cover, and the implications of an exposed border historically protected by ice.

Abdalati declined to read the minds of administration officials but noted that many believe the move against NCAR is retaliation.

Colorado has been singled out, he said, because its governor has not pardoned or shown leniency to Peters, whose conviction relates to the administration’s view of the 2020 election. Federal funding for climate and environmental research has faced uncertainty recently, including impacts on Waleed Abdalati’s lab.

That uncertainty has had a tremendous impact on morale, and when morale is low, people don’t function as well as they otherwise would, Abdalati said.

“The removal of a huge percent of the workforce on the federal side, the challenges to grants so funds are not flowing, really takes a toll on our people,” he stated. “People don’t do this work for the glamor or for the money.

““I don’t think there’s alarmism by the scientists at NCAR. They do research and they report, through peer review, what they find. The fact that some of it is or can be alarming doesn’t make the alarm the goal of the work.” — Waleed Abdalati, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Inside Climate News reported that NCAR has assessed the risks and possible responses to the changing climate for decades. Abdalati emphasized that the center does far more than climate work and that dismantling it would compromise a tremendous capability. The National Center for Atmospheric Research is federally funded. Steve Curwood interviewed Waleed Abdalati for the public radio program Living on Earth.”