The Trump administration is ending the annual NOAA “Arctic Report Card,” which was aimed at cataloguing climate change’s purported effect on the region, Politico E&E reported August 11.
The authors of the report were informed on August 10 that the report was to be suspended. NOAA has published the report since 2006.
“Ending the agency support is the latest in a series of steps President Donald Trump has taken to squelch federal climate research,” Zack Colman wrote for Politico E&E. “His administration has also sought to break up the National Center for Atmospheric Research and gutted the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which produces a sweeping federal assessment of climate science.”
“A NOAA spokesperson confirmed the agency would no longer facilitate the report, but that the agency would continue to collect and publish data historically used in it.”
“‘The Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing Arctic Research Program will continue to support observations, models and products that contribute to national security, weather prediction, safety of navigation, and the economic vitality of coastal communities,’ the spokesperson said in a statement.”
The Trump administration allowed the report card’s publishing last year, but did not make efforts to disseminate it publicly. The Agency told Politico E&E that the data used in the report card will be published despite the report’s shuttering.
“The Arctic Report Card is typically one of the major news events at the annual conference for the American Geophysical Union, an organization of Earth and space scientists. Previous reports have documented some daunting discoveries about the effect climate change has had on the Arctic, including how perturbations in the northern latitudes ripple across the planet. Those include issues ranging from the effect of melting ice on global sea-level rise to recent findings that the Arctic for the first time became a global contributor to climate change due to rapidly thawing, carbon-rich permafrost.”
Read more at Politico E&E.
