Germany is Building an Ark For US Climate Data
The move comes amid fears that the Trump administration could meddle with the data ahead of the next critical United Nations climate assessment.
In Hamburg, technicians are installing several new “racks” alongside the scores that are already housed in the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ), one of the world’s largest repositories for climate simulation data.
Under normal circumstances, the DKRZ’s mission is to provide computing power and storage to the German climate science community. But these new racks will serve a different and highly sensitive purpose: They will store backup versions of climate simulations from the other side of the Atlantic.
The operation aims to ensure that essential work performed by U.S. scientists for the next major U.N. climate assessment, due in 2029, cannot be meddled with or compromised by the Trump administration, which has slashed funding for climate research, buried scientific reports, removed references to human-caused warming from dozens of government websites, and sought to prevent satellites from collecting key climate data. Leaders of German science organizations publicly cite these actions as their primary motivation for creating backups.
The German Research Foundation, the country’s main science funding body, believes that the Trump administration could block European access to data and research findings stored in the U.S. “The deletion of data has also become a possibility,” says the foundation’s program manager, Kathrin Winkler, “and there is a risk that [data] could be manipulated to skew findings in a desired direction.”
Christopher Kadow, head of the data analysis division at the DKRZ, says, “We cannot simply accept that important contributions might be lost for technical or political reasons.”
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