The Trump administration is considering cancelling the lease of the support
office for a renowned Hawaiian climate research station, sources said,
raising fears for the future of key work tracking the impact of carbon
emissions on global warming.
The office is one of more than 20 rented by the U.S. National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration that are proposed to have their leases ended
under money-saving efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency
led by billionaire Elon Musk.
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The online listing on the DOGE website mentions an NOAA office in Hilo,
Hawaii and an estimate of how much would be saved by cancelling its lease
- $150,692 a year.
Staff, researchers and other sources gave details on the building's role as
the main support office for the Mauna Loa Observatory about 50 km (30
miles) west of the town.
The observatory, established in 1956 on the northern flank of the Mauna
Loa volcano, is recognised as the birthplace of global carbon dioxide
monitoring and maintains the world's longest record of measurements of
atmospheric CO2.
It was not immediately clear how far the lease cancellation plan has gone,
and whether the office would be shut or moved. NOAA staff declined to
comment publicly and their communications office did not respond to an
emailed request for comment.
DOGE did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
"You need a Hilo office," said Ralph Keeling, a climate scientist at the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California who conducts fieldwork at
Mauna Loa.
His father, Charles David Keeling, used Mauna Loa measurements to
establish the famed Keeling Curve - a graph showing the accumulation of
carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere from 1958 up to the present, charting
an upward trajectory as humans continued to burn fossil fuels.
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Station staff in Hilo regularly travel between the town office to the volcanic
peaks of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, Ralph Keeling said, collecting air
samples in glass flasks which they ferry back to Hilo and ship to a NOAA
laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, where scientists analyse greenhouse gas
concentrations.
Some scientists and politicians have accused the Trump administration of
launching a wider assault on climate research, with the federal government
clawing back climate funding and dismissing hundreds of workers from
NOAA, the government agency that provides weather forecasts.
Musk and his DOGE team have been tasked by Trump to slash the size and
cost of the federal bureaucracy and have said they have focused on
wasteful, unnecessary spending.
"It would be terrible if this office was closed," atmospheric scientist Marc
Alessi, a fellow with the Union of Concerned Scientists advocacy group,
said.
"Not only does it provide the measurement of CO2 that we so desperately
need to track climate change, but it also informs climate model simulations."
Others said the Trump administration had already made their work harder,
after the White House
froze, opens new tab
credit cards held by agency employees for a 30-day period under DOGE'S
"cost efficiency initiative".
"It has already become very difficult to continue our global greenhouse gas
monitoring network," an atmospheric scientist involved in NOAA's
measurements said, asking not to be named.
"It requires continuous shipping of sampling equipment black and forth all
over the world. Suddenly, we cannot use our government-issued credit
cards anymore ... It looks like our monitoring program will soon be dead,"
the scientist said.
A former NOAA official, who asked not to be named, said the lease on the
office was due to end on August 31.
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