By Gloria Dickie
LONDON (Reuters) – 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.
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.
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 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.
(Reporting by Gloria Dickie; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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