Fearing the Trump administration might meddle with U.S. climate data, scientists in Germany are preparing to transfer vast troves of that data to repositories in Hamburg.
Page F8From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 27 September 2026
German scientists prepare to move the U.S. climate record to Hamburg, out of the administration's reach
As it ran on the front
The rule that made automakers clean up their fleets died Saturday night. It was two years old.
The President said he had approved new fuel economy standards terminating it, and called the occasion a big day for workers and consumers. The wire, reading the same document, called it a boost for automakers. Both sentences ran in the same news cycle. Only one of them says who gets the money.…
…(cont) It was born in 2024, a set of pollution standards for the fleet, written — The Hill explains — to be hard to meet without putting electric cars in the lineup. That is not a trick. That is the ordinary shape of a standard: you set the number a little above where the industry is standing, and the industry walks to it. The buyer at the dealership never has to think about it. The buyer thinks about the sticker.
It is preceded in death by the power plant climate rules, which the administration went at on 14 September. The Hill's word for it was sledgehammer, and the paper needed a list of six takeaways to explain what had happened to them. It is survived, for the moment, by the suit environmental agencies filed over those rules on 17 September, and by the memory of 11 September, when a federal court ruled against the order keeping a Michigan coal plant running. Somebody in a robe said no. It is one of the few times this month anybody did.
Then the people who kept the record. On 24 September, Grist reported that a quiet network called Climate Reserve had been finding new work, one job at a time, for the climate workforce whose federal jobs were cut. That is what a lifeline looks like when it has to be improvised: not a program, just a list somebody keeps.
And now the record itself. Scientists in Germany are preparing to transfer vast troves of U.S. climate data to repositories in Hamburg, because they are afraid this administration will meddle with it. Data is a dull word for it. It is the shit people wrote down every day for a century — buoys, station logs, balloon flights — kept in the open because open was the entire point of keeping it. The heirs have decided to move the heirlooms abroad before the estate sale.
There is no malarkey in a thermometer. That is exactly why it needed a plane ticket.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you write your state attorney general and ask whether the state has joined the suit over the power plant rules — and keep the reply.
“They tell you it's a big day for consumers, and the same wire says it's a boost for automakers — those are two ways of describing one check, and it isn't made out to you. Look at the order of it: gut the plant rules, kill the mileage rules, cut the people who keep the numbers, and now foreign scientists are packing up our own weather records because they don't trust what happens to them here. When the folks who measure the air have to store the measurements on another continent, that's not a policy dispute, that's a family hiding the silver.”
“Nobody is touching anybody's data. If German researchers want to spend German money keeping a copy of publicly available American information, that's called international scientific cooperation, and frankly we should be flattered. Did I say copy? I said archive — an archive, which is a normal thing that normal countries do, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't put it the other way.”
Earlier in this story
- Trump terminates mileage rules, bills it a big day for consumers; the wire calls it a boost for automakers By Mort · the breakfast edition, 27 September 2026
The receipts
Climate Reserve is quietly building a lifeline for America's lost climate workforce, one job at a time.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.