American Scientists Created CO2 Monitoring; NOAA Hosts 40% Of Planet's Sites; Other Countries Prep For This To End

[hatrack]

This fall, when the World Meteorological Organization confirmed the grim news—a record 3.5 parts per million annual increase in the global concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—there was a somber, unspoken backstory. As the WMO compiled the numbers, it was preparing for the possibility that the central player in that monitoring effort—the United States—could withdraw at any time.

Just weeks after President Donald Trump returned to office in January, the White House budget office circulated a memo outlining its plan for an unprecedented cut to funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with climate research taking one of the biggest hits. The president’s budget proposal, released in May, gave details: a 30 percent slash in agency funding, including the elimination of its research office and Global Monitoring Laboratory. Under that plan, the historic observatory on Mauna Loa Volcano in Hawaii, which in 1958 launched the measurements that charted the definitive record of the Earth’s build-up of carbon dioxide, would be gone. “That was a shock for us,” said Oksana Tarasova, senior scientific officer for the WMO in Geneva. “Given the leading role of NOAA and given that they are the backbone of what we [have been doing], nobody can imagine that this may happen.”

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That puts the global scientific community in a difficult position. Although observations from 179 stations go into calculating the global average CO2 concentration, NOAA provides 40 percent of the observations—not just from Mauna Loa, but from stations across the continental United States, as far north as Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska, and at the U.S. observatory at the South Pole in Antarctica. NOAA also has been in charge of quality control, running calibration tests at its Global Monitoring Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, to ensure that equipment used around the world provides measurements that are accurate, comparable and repeatable.

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Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, revealed the plan to eliminate NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) and all climate laboratories in a budget preview circulated on Capitol Hill in the spring. He outlined ideas for “a leaner NOAA that focuses on core operational needs, eliminates unnecessary layers of bureaucracy, terminates nonessential grant programs, and ends activities that do not warrant a Federal role.” The memo envisioned a NOAA focused on weather data without collecting climate data. Vought had been an architect of the conservative policy plan Project 2025, and the NOAA proposal echoed it. “OAR is … the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism,” Project 2025 said. “The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05122025/global-scientists-carbon-monitoring-noaa-cuts/

[dedl67]

1. Criminal

As climatologist Michael Mann once said about the climate-change deniers in an article in Nature: "We're in a street fight with these people." At the moment we are not winning.