ABSTRACT
Both trust in climate knowledge and the truth it delivers descend from the organizational routines and truces necessary to share and maintain climate data. Starting in the 1990s, such routines and truces came under concerted attack. Mirroring trends in the larger society, an audit culture arose that sought to open the black boxes of scientific processes from positions outside the established boundaries of disciplinary expertise. Today, climate knowledge infrastructures are threatened by an American administration hostile to the very concept of anthropogenic climate change. It seeks to eliminate key instruments, de-fund climate data analysis and other research, rewrite the rules of peer review, and privatize the collection of Earth science data. These shifts target the chain of evidence regarding climate change, the stability of the peer review system, and the climate research funding paradigm in place since the 1950s. Virtually all scientific knowledge of public concern may be affected by this transformation.
