Germany Builds Data 'Ark' to Shield US Climate Science — SkimNews
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- The German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) in Hamburg is installing new racks adding about 5 petabytes to its existing 254 petabytes of storage to hold backup copies of US climate simulations for the IPCC's 2029 assessment, in a project called CMIP7-ark.
- The German Research Foundation launched a $35 million program in late 2025 to permanently store copies of US public and open scientific data, with program manager Kathrin Winkler warning that data deletion or manipulation to skew findings is now a real risk.
- Six other US data backup projects with names including SHIELD and SEND (Secure Endangered Earth Data) have also received funding, alongside the American Geophysical Union's Data Resilience Project launched in summer 2025.
- The Trump administration has slashed climate research funding, quit both the IPCC and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in January, and removed references to human-caused warming from government websites; it tried to defund the Mauna Loa Observatory in 2025, but Congress rejected those cuts.
- Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency team in early April 2025 removed all 300 datasets from NASA's Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center, prompting institutions to scrape the data and transfer it to the Harvard Dataverse Repository.
- The American Geophysical Union nominated nearly 300 US scientists as IPCC authors when the administration refused to send US experts to 2025 IPCC meetings, and gathered ~100 experts in Berlin in March to address data resilience.
- Russia's bombardments of Ukraine have destroyed universities and research institutes, and a German-Polish-Ukrainian collaboration had already digitized 1808–1880 Ukrainian meteorological records and transferred them to the University of Giessen before the 2022 invasion.
Why it matters: Germany is committing at least $35 million and specialized infrastructure to safeguard data that US taxpayers already funded, because the Trump administration has gutted climate research budgets, quit two UN climate bodies, and allowed DOGE to erase NASA datasets outright. The practical cost is severe: petabytes take months to transfer online, forcing institutions to physically ship hard drives and magnetic tapes across borders — diverting time and money from research itself while racing to protect the US contribution to the IPCC's 2029 global assessment.
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