Science 2, Trump 1 as U.S. Courts Rule on Climate Cutbacks

Two major research institutions got a new lease on life but more than 900 deep-ocean monitoring units are being removed as Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle climate science made their way through the U.S. Congress and court system.

The iconic Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai’i, “home of the Keeling Curve and one of the most consequential scientific records humanity has ever produced,” survived successive eruptions of volcanic lava and Trumpian cost-cutting to enter a “major rebuild”, We Don’t Have Time founder and CEO Ingmar Rentzhog reported in his Forbes magazine column late last month. And in Denver a couple of days later, a federal judge stopped the U.S. government from breaking up the renowned National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) by handing its supercomputing centre over to the University of Wyoming, the Colorado Sun wrote.

But Trump officials have begun ripping 900 sensors out of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans despite the U.S. Congress twice instructing them to stand down. That action effectively dismantles the state-of-the-art Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), a critical ocean floor research network, just a decade after it launched, stated Oceanographic Magazine.

The Mauna Loa win was deeply significant, and it wasn’t a sure thing, Rentzhog wrote.

“Last spring, the headlines were grim,” he recalled, with the Trump administration threatening to cancel the lease on the Mauna Loa lab as part of a wider cost-cutting drive. A year later, the facility is being “reopened, rebuilt, and expanded,” with science activities back up and running and renovations in the works. But “how it was saved is also a warning about how easily it could have been lost.”

Mauna Loa is important because of the bedrock piece of the climate science puzzle that it brought into being. The Keeling Curve “is famous because it is so brutally simple,” Rentzhog explained. “Year after year, CO2 rises. Season after season, the planet breathes in and out, but the long-term direction is unmistakable. The Keeling Curve does not argue. It measures.”

For that reason, “Mauna Loa is not just another observatory. Sitting more than 11,000 feet up the slope of Hawai’i’s largest volcano, far from local pollution, it is one of the places where humanity learned to see climate change directly, through measurement rather than theory.”

But the observatory’s value depends on maintaining a continuous record of CO2 concentrations. That record has been threatened twice in the last four years—first by a volcanic eruption that cut off the lab’s road access and destroyed power lines that were replaced by solar panels and batteries, then by a $150,000 line item in a Trump administration cost-cutting document.

“The second threat was political, and far cheaper to inflict,” Rentzhog recalled, a budget cut that left the observatory untouched but took out an “unglamourous” administrative office that made its operations possible. By the summer of 2025, the matter was resolved, with Congress getting the final say.

In Colorado, meanwhile, senior U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson issued a scathing, 38-page injunction that took the Trump administration to task for “enacting political revenge on Colorado,” after the U.S. National Science Foundation moved to divest NCAR of its supercomputer. Jackson ruled that move would be “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law”, making a court challenge plausible enough to warrant the injunction.

The consortium of more than 100 universities that manages NCAR “has made a showing of irreparable harm through the significant ‘brain drain’ that it is already experiencing as a direct result” of the attempted transfer, he wrote. “It will also continue to lose critical employees—including scientists, engineers, and systems administrators—that are essential to the continuous and proper functioning” of the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center.

“Since its founding in 1960, NCAR has trained generations of scientists, served the military and other government agencies, developed models that foretold climate change, and deepened knowledge of critical weather phenomena, such as El Niño and wind shear,” wrote Bloomberg News.

But the National Science Foundation also scored a win for the Trump administration, sending ships this month to begin dismantling what Oceanographic Magazine called a “critical ocean-floor observation network” worth $370 million. Marine meteorologist Jim Edson, who led the OOI, described it as “the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems.”

But “since taking office, Trump’s administration has consistently targeted the network’s budget, and proposed 80% funding cuts in both 2025 and 2026,” the publication said. “While Congress successfully pushed back on both occasions to restore the necessary money, the NSF moved ahead with decommissioning, despite managers previously attempting to save the network by limiting data collection to cut costs.”

Among other achievements, the network’s Irminger Sea moorings, fixed 2,800 metres below the ocean surface, “have been crucial to tracking dangerous changes occurring in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC), a global current system that scientists fear could be destabilizing.”

On LinkedIn, Planet Cents founder Leslie Sheridan said NSF began tearing down the network on the first day of hurricane season.

“Congress already told them twice they couldn’t do it. They did it anyway,” she wrote. “This is not a climate change story. This is a hurricane story. A flooding story. A fisheries story. A weather forecasting story. A food security story.”

Sheridan added that the loss of the OOI network was part of a wider “full science destruction ledger” that includes a $17-billion cut to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.