Several faculty members at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, who spoke with KAZU on the condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, said they’ve felt pressured to stop referring to climate change in their research since Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called for the elimination of “‘climate’ distraction” in the military in March.
To avoid drawing scrutiny from Hegseth’s Department of Defense (DOD), members of the school’s Climate Security Network (CSN) reluctantly took down their website and paused their newsletter earlier this year, according to an NPS source. Faculty established the CSN in 2022 to prepare the Navy to adapt its operations to climate change.
According to KAZU’s sources at NPS, hiding the CSN’s work undermines the university’s mission to ensure combat readiness—and leaves the military less prepared for changing environments.
NPS is one of a small number of military universities with faculty dedicated to studying how climate change impacts military operations. In recent years, NPS faculty have researched how increasingly frequent hurricanes and floods threaten military bases, how a warming arctic will introduce new challenges for the Navy, and how extreme heat—made more frequent by climate change—increases health risks for military personnel.
“The primary mission of the military universities is to prepare their students to be leaders in national security,” said Tom Murphree, an emeritus faculty member at NPS who worked in the meteorology department, in a text message. “They can’t succeed in that mission when they delete politically inconvenient facts from their education and research.”
When reached by KAZU for comment, NPS president Ann Rondeau referred questions to the Navy’s Chief of Information office, which also declined to comment.
In a move similar to the shuttering of the CSN website, the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at NPS took its library offline in March to analyze and remove research that addressed climate change impacts, planning and preparedness, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). The decision came on the heels of President Trump’s executive orders denouncing federal DEI initiatives and a Feb. 14 Department of Homeland Security memo reportedly calling for the elimination of climate change terminology in DHS policies and programs. The library came back online in May.
John Conger worked at the DOD until 2017 and now advises the Center for Climate and Security, a nonpartisan think tank. Since Donald Trump took office in January, Conger has urged national security researchers to avoid politically charged buzzwords in order to keep doing their work.
“If you mean sea level rise, say sea level rise. If you mean flooding, say flooding,” he said. “There’s a degree of political climate adaptation that has to be done.”
