Trump administration pulls support for annual Arctic environmental report

Filed 1w ago · Via Grist · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: From Henry Mayhew's "London Labour and the London Poor", 185 · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

NOAA has withdrawn support for the Arctic Report Card, an annual peer-reviewed environmental assessment it has coordinated since 2006, agency spokesperson Kim Doster confirmed to the New York Times. Doster offered no explanation beyond saying other NOAA programs would keep contributing data and that unspecified national-security and economic research would continue.

This year's report found Arctic surface temperatures from October 2024 to September 2025 were the warmest since 1900, winter sea ice hit a 47-year low, and thawing permafrost has turned rivers in over 200 Alaska watersheds orange with iron and toxic metals. Report editors Rick Thoman and Twila Moon say they are scrambling to find a way to continue the project outside federal auspices, with 2026 now in doubt.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

An agency whose job is measuring an emergency has decided the measuring is optional, while insisting all the useful parts will simply continue on their own. That the raw data supposedly survives is meant to be reassuring; it mostly confirms that what's being cut is the analysis, the credibility, and the inconvenient annual reminder that the Arctic is on fire. Calling this a matter of coordination rather than politics is the kind of statement that answers a question nobody asked.

Source: Read the original at Grist → Scored: DarxieLand · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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