Scientists in Germany are preparing to transfer large volumes of U.S. climate data to secure storage facilities in Hamburg. This move is driven by concerns that the Trump administration might interfere with or compromise the data. The German Climate Computing Center, known as DKRZ, is installing new equipment to add about 5 petabytes of storage, bringing its total capacity to 254 petabytes. The goal is to protect essential U.S. contributions to the next major U.N. climate assessment, due in 2029, from potential interference. The Trump administration has taken actions such as reducing funding for climate research, removing references to human-caused warming from government websites, and attempting to prevent satellites from collecting key climate data. The German Research Foundation, the country's main science funding body, cited these actions as a key reason for creating backups. It expressed concerns that the Trump administration could block European access to U.S. data or manipulate it to skew findings. In response, the German Research Foundation launched a $35 million program in late 2025 to provide a safe storage location for U.S. data from public and open sources. The DKRZ project, named CMIP7-ark, is described as a critical backup for U.S. contributions to the seventh IPCC assessment. Other projects, such as SHIELD and SEND (Secure Endangered Earth Data), have also received funding. Christopher Kadow, head of the data analysis division at DKRZ, emphasized the importance of preserving contributions from U.S. scientists, stating that important data should not be lost due to technical or political reasons. The U.S. government withdrew from both the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in January, although U.S. researchers continue to contribute to global climate science. The need for more resilient data storage and accessibility has become a key focus for international scientific organizations, including the American Geophysical Union (AGU), which has taken a leading role in protecting science and scientists from politically motivated attacks. In early April 2025, datasets from NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) were removed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team. Efforts by various institutions were required to secure the information and transfer it to the Harvard Dataverse Repository. This incident highlighted the vulnerability of scientific data in the U.S. under the current administration. Similar concerns exist globally, with research institutions in Croatia and Germany being targets of hacking operations. The war in Ukraine has also caused significant damage to scientific infrastructure, prompting efforts to transfer data and samples to secure locations. A German-Polish-Ukrainian collaboration helped digitize historical meteorological records from Ukrainian stations and transfer them to a server in Germany to prevent data loss. The AGU gathering in Berlin in March focused on increasing resilience in scientific data management. Nearly 100 experts discussed responses to the Trump administration's attacks on science, emphasizing the need for global coordination and secure storage solutions. A broad coalition of German national research centers has formed to offer safe storage for public domain information to scientists from the U.S. and other countries. Other initiatives include the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, which saves data from wildlife trail cameras in Ukraine and biodiversity data from Yemen. Ensuring that data remains analyzable indefinitely requires not only storing the data itself but also the specialized software needed to read and analyze it. Frank Oliver Glöckner, a professor of Earth systems data science, highlighted the importance of sharing data globally to prevent loss due to political or natural disasters. Kadow of the DKRZ suggested that connecting all climate data worldwide via digital pipelines could provide a safeguard against threats, allowing data to be secured elsewhere with minimal effort. He also noted that political shifts in Germany, such as the rise of the far-right AfD, could pose similar risks to scientific data storage and accessibility.