Berliner Tageblatt - 'Imposing ignorance': US climate science under siege

After the mass layoffs and budget cuts of the early days of President Donald Trump's second term, the administration is barreling ahead in its war on climate science, at a time when the world's oceans and land masses face record-breaking heat.

In 2025, the Arctic Report Card, cancelled this week, found the polar region had experienced its hottest year since records began, with cascading impacts from melting glaciers and sea ice to greening landscapes and disruptions to global weather.

"The Arctic is a bellwether of climate change," Rick Spinrad, a former administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told AFP. "They're imposing ignorance on the system in the hopes that that will address the challenges that are real associated with climate change."

- Global impacts -

The Arctic is warming several times faster than the global average, a phenomenon known as "Arctic amplification" -- and the effects aren't confined to the North Pole.

For example, losing sea ice injects more freshwater into the North Atlantic, making surface waters less dense and salty and hindering their ability to sink and drive the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which helps keep Europe's winters milder.

NOAA, which has published the Report Card annually since 2006, did not explain its demise, saying only that "Coordination of the 2026 Arctic Report Card will not be facilitated through NOAA" and that prior data would remain publicly available.

It is the latest in a long line of actions by the Trump administration against science documenting the impacts of human-caused climate change.

Last week, the National Academy of Sciences, a Congressionally-chartered yet independent body, removed from its website a chapter on climate science from a manual for judges.

It came after Trump took to Truth Social to blast the chapter as "fraudulent, biased and misleading" and accuse the NAS of being run by "Radical Left Democrats."

A statement by the NAS alluded to "considerable scrutiny," adding it had determined "that questions about the processes used to develop the chapter warrant an independent review, and the chapter will not appear on our website while that review is underway."

A spokesperson told AFP on Wednesday: "We expect to complete the review this fall."

The decision attracted attention particularly because the NAS had weeks earlier released a comprehensive review of climate attribution science.

That review examined whether individual extreme weather events can be linked to climate change and found the science robust for many phenomena -- a question pivotal to dozens of cases against oil and gas companies working their way through US courts.

- 'Broad attack' -

Carly Phillips, a senior scientist with the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, said she saw a "broad attack on attribution science that's been happening for many months," including from Republicans in Congress, who are pushing to outlaw climate accountability lawsuits.

"Judges need reliable scientific information about climate change so that they can evaluate those cases on their merits," she told AFP.

These developments follow the administration's rescission in February of the "endangerment finding," the 2009 determination that greenhouse gas pollution endangers human health and must be regulated.

Its immediate effect was to wipe out federal vehicle emissions standards. But the same framework underpins limits on power plants, just as the AI boom drives a surge of new natural gas projects.

The administration's attacks are "a losing effort given the piling up of evidence and the fact that people are seeing and feeling the consequences of climate change so dramatically this summer with the heat domes and wildfires," climatologist Michael Mann, co-author of the new book "Science Under Siege," told AFP.

"But that doesn't mean they won't continue to try."

A.Gasser--BTB