Why Germany is building an ark for US climate data

At the German Climate Computing Center in Hamburg, technicians are adding storage racks specifically to back up US climate simulation data ahead of the 2029 UN climate assessment. The German Research Foundation has committed $35 million to the effort, called CMIP7-ark, after the US quit both the IPCC and the UN climate framework in January.

German officials cite the Trump administration's funding cuts, buried reports, and scrubbed government websites as reasons they no longer trust the data to stay put or stay accurate in place. A foundation program manager said deletion and manipulation of findings are both now considered live risks, and pointed to the administration's earlier attempt to defund the Mauna Loa Observatory, a plan Congress rejected.

Several other projects, with names like SHIELD and SEND, are backing up additional US datasets, including NASA's Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center, whose 300 datasets a former manager says are now considered vulnerable. Most scientific data has historically lived in one place because duplicating petabytes is slow and expensive, but researchers now consider the political risk greater than the logistical one.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.