As the world grapples with unprecedented record-breaking heat across oceans and continents, the second-term Trump administration has escalated its long-running campaign against climate science, with two high-profile recent actions that have sparked alarm among the scientific community. The latest blow came this week, when the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced it would cancel production of its 2026 Arctic Report Card – a widely cited annual benchmark analysis of polar climate change that the agency has published continuously since 2006.
The 2025 edition of the report card, released just months before the cancellation, delivered a stark warning: the Arctic had just wrapped its warmest year since systematic record-keeping began, with far-reaching consequences ranging from accelerating glacier melt and sea ice collapse to shifting vegetation patterns and disruptions to global weather systems. Unlike lower latitudes, the Arctic warms up to four times faster than the global average due to a well-documented effect called Arctic amplification, and changes in the polar region do not stay isolated at the North Pole. For example, massive amounts of freshwater released by melting sea ice dilute the salt concentration of North Atlantic surface waters, making them less dense and slowing the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation – the ocean current system that keeps European winters far milder than they would otherwise be.
In a statement announcing the cancellation, NOAA offered no explanation for the decision beyond saying that “Coordination of the 2026 Arctic Report Card will not be facilitated through NOAA.” The agency added that all historical data from past report cards would remain available to the public.
Shortly before the report card cancellation, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) – an independent, congressionally chartered leading scientific body – removed a chapter on climate science from an online reference manual for federal judges. The move came after former President Trump took to his social platform Truth Social to denounce the chapter as “fraudulent, biased and misleading,” claiming the NAS was controlled by “Radical Left Democrats.”
In a public statement, the NAS acknowledged the decision followed “considerable scrutiny,” noting that “questions about the processes used to develop the chapter warrant an independent review, and the chapter will not appear on our website while that review is underway.” A NAS spokesperson told Agence France-Presse this week the organization expects to wrap up the review by fall 2026. The removal drew particular attention because just weeks earlier, the NAS had released a landmark comprehensive review of climate attribution science – the field that links individual extreme weather events to human-caused climate change – which confirmed the science is robust for most extreme weather phenomena. That conclusion is a central piece of evidence in dozens of ongoing lawsuits against major oil and gas companies currently working their way through U.S. court systems.
These two recent developments are just the latest in a consistent pattern of actions by the Trump administration to suppress research and documentation linking fossil fuel use to human-caused climate change. Early in the administration’s second term, widespread mass layoffs and deep budget cuts targeted federal climate research agencies, and in February 2026, the administration rescinded the 2009 “endangerment finding” – the foundational regulatory determination that greenhouse gas pollution poses a proven threat to human health and requires federal oversight. The rescission immediately eliminated federal vehicle emissions standards, and the same regulatory framework underpins existing pollution limits for coal and gas power plants, a change that comes as the global AI boom drives a surge in new natural gas plant construction to power data centers.
Carly Phillips, senior scientist at the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists, called the recent actions part of a years-long broad attack on climate attribution science, a campaign that also includes efforts by congressional Republicans to ban climate accountability lawsuits against fossil fuel companies entirely. “Judges need reliable scientific information about climate change so that they can evaluate those cases on their merits,” Phillips told AFP.
Rick Spinrad, former NOAA administrator under the prior administration, framed the cancellation of the Arctic Report Card as a deliberate effort to suppress critical information. “The Arctic is a bellwether of climate change,” Spinrad said. “They’re imposing ignorance on the system in the hopes that that will address the challenges that are real associated with climate change.”
Leading climatologist Michael Mann, co-author of the new book *Science Under Siege*, argued the administration’s campaign against climate science is ultimately futile, given the overwhelming accumulation of evidence and the visible impacts of climate change that the public experienced firsthand this summer, from deadly heat domes across North America and Europe to devastating wildfires from Canada to the Mediterranean. “It’s a losing effort given the piling up of evidence and the fact that people are seeing and feeling the consequences of climate change so dramatically this summer,” Mann told AFP. “But that doesn’t mean they won’t continue to try.”