PLEA Network

22 December 2025, The Guardian: Trump’s shuttering of the National Center for Atmospheric Research is Stalinist. This is the latest in the relentless purge of climate researchers who refuse to be co-opted by the fossil fuel industry. The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin would no doubt have understood and even appreciated the latest attack by the Trump administration on climate researchers and their work. The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, is to be dismantled after more than 50 years at the forefront of global research on climate science and monitoring. This is the latest step in the administration’s climate Lysenkoism and its relentless purge of climate researchers who refuse to be co-opted into its quest for American energy dominance though fossil fuels. Stalin’s embrace of the work of Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko, who wrongly believed that wheat could inherit characteristics acquired by previous generations, underpinned policies that failed to prevent crop failures and millions of deaths from famine during the 1930s. Scientists who opposed Lysenkoism were denounced, fired, imprisoned and even executed. While Trump has not gone as far as Stalin, his administration’s persecution of climate researchers could ultimately lead to many millions of deaths from increases in extreme weather and sea level rise in the United States and across the world. Read more here