In May, the Trump administration released its fiscal 2026 budget request, which called for cutting National Science Foundation and NASA science budgets by more than half. The administration’s proposed NOAA budget, released a few weeks later, proposes eliminating the agency’s scientific research arm altogether, terminating over 1,000 additional employees and shuttering around a dozen institutes, including GFDL. It includes the line: “With this termination, NOAA will no longer support climate research grants.”
“The proposed budget is a disaster for science,” said one senior federal scientist who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. “It’s existential for almost everything that any of the agencies are doing.” If scientists’ pleas fall short and the budget passes through Congress, the official warned, “The sky will go dark.”
Some climate researchers are pivoting to different fields, while others are seeking employment abroad. Efforts overseas will pick up some of the slack, but losing the continued observations and federal funding for the world’s leading climate research ecosystem would handicap the global collaborative effort to monitor the planet. “The United States has been very important in the past, and it’s just taking itself off the map,” Stevens said. “It’ll be a setback for everyone.” Even a course correction in the 2028 elections might not make up for the disruption of momentum. “It’s quicker to tear the building down than it is to build it up,” Randall said.
The biggest impacts will likely be felt by early-career researchers. The GFDL scientists dismissed in February re-entered the job market to find that many universities and federal labs had stopped hiring. “It’s a collapse of support for the next generation of scientists,” Labe said. Beyond the lack of employment opportunities, the blatant attack on climate science leaves some early-career researchers with “a deep existential crisis,” said one fired federal scientist who also requested anonymity. Modeling the climate “is an important thing that we do as a society,” the researcher added. “What does it mean if the country I live in no longer values that?”
In May, a handful of early-career meteorologists and climatologists organized a livestreamed virtual rally. For 100 consecutive hours, more than 200 scientists presented research and fielded questions from the public. Over those four days, viewers placed over 7,000 calls to their congressional representatives, urging them to prioritize funding for weather and climate science. The livestream closed with a message from one of the organizers, Jonah Bloch-Johnson, a climate scientist at Tufts University, who called the funding cuts “our own unnatural disaster in the making.” He encouraged listeners to continue marveling at the complexity of the Earth system — to appreciate how the clouds dance in the sky and how the waters ebb and flow. “This science belongs to you,” he said. “It’s the science of the world we all live in.”
The Dust Lingers
In 2014, a gust of wind struck the Sahara, launching a dust cloud into the atmosphere. After a few days’ travel, some of the specks landed on a buoy floating in the North Atlantic off the coast of French Guyana. When scientists collected this sample and analyzed it in the lab, they noticed that some of the grains were huge — 15 times bigger than the largest particles they thought could be swept overseas.
“We were all wondering, how can it be possible that they actually stay suspended in the air for so long?” said Klose, the Karlsruhe Institute aerosol scientist. Over the last few years, she and her colleagues have realized that these extra-coarse grains account for around 85% of the total dust mass in the atmosphere.
While they’re still not sure how these giant grains travel so far, they’re confident that they represent an overlooked climate variable. Dust was thought to mainly reflect sunlight, but larger grains primarily absorb it. In a new paper now under review, Klose and colleagues report how current models are underestimating the impact of these particles on Earth’s energy balance by a factor of two, calling into question whether dust has an overall cooling effect on the climate, as previously suspected, or whether it’s actually amplifying warming. This uncertainty is critical, as over 5 billion tons of dust — around 1,000 times the weight of the Great Pyramid of Giza — are lofted into the atmosphere annually. And thanks to agriculture and other land-use changes, dust emission is only rising, having roughly doubled since the Industrial Revolution.
Scientists have been working to better track the journey of dust and more realistically simulate its climatic effects. NASA’s Earth Observing System operates three satellites that track properties of dust in the atmosphere. But in Trump’s proposed budget, all three are slated for cancellation.
Still, Klose is determined to keep an eye on the dust. Every few years, she brings tiny shovels and giant air-sucking machines to deserts across the world to collect samples. Then she transports those samples back to her lab in southern Germany and other labs, where her colleagues blow them inside a metal chamber to study how they stimulate cloud formation. Those results get fed directly into climate models to better represent how variations in tiny grains influence the nature of the entire planet.
“Obviously we can never, ever represent this in all its wonderful beauty in detail,” Klose said. Nevertheless, she said, she aims to learn as much as possible about the invisible intricacy of Earth before the dust settles. “We don’t have any plans to give up any time soon.”