Do not throw away the supercomputer with the local weather fashions – what’s incorrect with it?

Listening to the collective wailing coming out of Boulder, Colorado, this week, you’d think the Trump administration had just announced plans to shut down the National Weather Service and replace Doppler radar with tea leaves.

In reality, what’s on the table is far more nuanced and far less apocalyptic than the headlines suggest.

According to USA TODAY, the administration plans to dismantle or restructure the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), long considered the flagship of atmospheric and climate science. Predictably, this was portrayed as an “attack on science,” a “threat to public safety,” and—my personal favorite—a blow to America’s “competitive advantage.”

Keyword hysteria.

But let’s pause for a moment and part ways Weather science, useful computing infrastructureAnd Politics-driven climate alarmismbecause the merger of the three is how we got into this mess in the first place.

NCAR was founded in 1960 to advance atmospheric chemistry, physical meteorology and weather forecasting. In this respect it has an impressive resume. Hurricane drop probes, advances in numerical weather forecasting, and severe weather research are real, tangible contributions that have saved lives and property. Even long-time critics of climate hyperbole — including Roger Pielke Jr. — recognize NCAR as a scientific “crown jewel” that deserves improvement, not destruction.

The problem is not that NCAR affects the weather.

The problem is that NCAR is becoming increasingly common became.

Over the past two decades, NCAR—like much of federally funded climate science—has evolved from the rigor of observation to science Model-driven storytelling. Computer models tuned to assumptions and parameterizations that consistently overstate warming and extreme weather trends became the dominant product. These results were then laundered through press offices and compliant media as “settled science,” free of uncertainties and margins of error.

This is not atmospheric science. This is advocacy.

When an institution begins hosting “justice-centered” programs, water relations art exhibitions, and ideological framing exercises under the banner of geoscience, it invites scrutiny. The government’s criticism of “woke” or policy-driven research may be blunt, but it is not entirely misplaced.

Climate models are useful tools but terrible oracles

To be clear: climate models are not useless. They are tools – tools of exploration – not crystal balls.

Yet NCAR’s climate modeling efforts have been routinely used to justify sweeping political claims: existential crises, “exceeded thresholds,” and predictions of unprecedented catastrophe. Many of these claims fail to provide basic validation using historical data. Satellite records, surface observations and extreme weather statistics simply do not support the worst-case forecasts sold to the public.

When models diverge from reality, the scientific response should be recalibration and humility – not louder press releases.

This is where skepticism becomes not only reasonable, but necessary.

However, completely dismantling NCAR – especially without a scalpel – runs the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The USA TODAY article notes that NCAR operates a federally owned company Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne, Wyoming. This institution is a national asset, regardless of one’s views on climate policy. High performance computing is not ideological per se. It can support:

• Short-term weather forecast
• Modeling severe storms
• Aviation and military applications
• Hydrology and flood forecasting
• Energy load forecast
• Even non-climate science research has no connection to CO₂ at all

It would be an act of bureaucratic vandalism to shut it down simply because some of its cycles were used to simulate overheated climate scenarios.

A far more rational approach would be Conversion and realignment.

Remove advocacy. Refocus on observational science. Decouple supercomputing from politically driven climate modeling. Relocate critical infrastructure to where it can serve broader national interests—or at least place it under management that understands the difference between uncertainty and certainty theater.

The media narrative wants a villain versus hero story: Trump versus science. Reality is messier – and more interesting.

There are valid criticisms of how climate science has been politicized, how uncertainty has been buried, and how institutions like NCAR have increasingly blurred the line between research and activism. Ignoring this problem would be irresponsible.

However, responding with a blunt instrument risks collateral damage to areas of atmospheric science that actually work and matter.

Reform NCAR? Absolutely.
Check his programs? Long overdue.
Curb the model-driven hysteria? Please.

But before anyone unplugs completely, it might be wise to remember this The weather is real, models are fallible and supercomputers don’t coordinate.

If the goal is better science—not fairer narratives—then precision, not destruction, should be the order of the day.

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