Cuts have consequences

 

Does it need to be said that elections have consequences?

Stop electing Republicans.

Good grief.

DOGE kills 27 in Kentucky and Missouri

 

But will anyone tell them that's why?

Destroyer of worlds

 

Imagine what a huge gap there's going to be in records for everything needed to understand and navigate the future.  There will be no recovering it.

Trump 2.0 - Destroyer of worlds

 

The lights are going out over America

 

UPDATE 03:24 pm:  Fox News!

There's ONE Fox host who won't be given a job in the Trump administration.

Trump 2.0 - Destroyer of worlds

 Even though Musk is slashing and burning nearly every federal agency, somehow, this one has the flavor of a personal vendetta on Trump's part, mad as he was about NOAA overriding his ridiculous declaration about Hurricane Dorian and his Sharpie-altered map.

Trump 2.0 - We're all gonna die

 

UPDATE 03/01/2025:

Burn it all down - Part whatever

 

Yeah, we'll offset that as far as it's good for the planet.

Project 2025: NOAA

We’ll keep our attention on Project 2025. It’s so important that it’s one of the few times Trump has backed down. For a man who usually doubles down and keeps going, no matter how unpopular (family separation at the border), crazy (insisting he never had sex with Stormy Daniels), or dangerous (aligning with strongmen like Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orbán) his takes are, Trump’s reversal on Project 2025 is remarkable. As Americans learned more about it, the crescendo of anti-Trump sentiment over it led Trump to try to distance himself.

We’ve discussed Trump’s strong ties to the Heritage Foundation and the Project previously. A hidden camera recording made by British journalists that was released this week has one of the Project’s co-authors, Russell Vought, bragging that the group was secretly drafting “the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans if he wins, describing his work as creating ‘shadow’ agencies.

  Joyce Vance

This article discusses Trump's plans for the weather service.

Making America great again

Is this how the Iranians felt when the mullahs took over?

The Trump administration has recently removed the chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s premier scientific agency, installed new political staff who have questioned accepted facts about climate change and imposed stricter controls on communications at the agency.

The moves threaten to stifle a major source of objective United States government information about climate change that underpins federal rules on greenhouse gas emissions and offer an indication of the direction the agency will take if President Trump wins re-election.

[...]

NOAA officials have tried to get information about what role the new political staff members would play and what their objectives might be, with little success. According to people close to the administration who have questioned climate science, though, their primary goal is to undercut the National Climate Assessment.

[...]

[Judith Curry, a former chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and] others said that, if Mr. Trump wins re-election, further changes at NOAA would include removing longtime authors of the [National Climate Assessment] and adding new ones who challenge the degree to which warming is occurring, the extent to which it is caused by human activities and the danger it poses to human health, national security and the economy.

A biased or diminished climate assessment would have wide-ranging implications.

It could be used in court to bolster the positions of fossil fuel companies being sued for climate damages. It could counter congressional efforts to reduce carbon emissions. And, it ultimately could weaken what is known as the “endangerment finding,” a 2009 scientific finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that said greenhouse gases endanger public health and thus obliged the federal government to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act.

[...]

Dr. Noble, the new chief of staff, has already pushed to install a new layer of scrutiny on grants that NOAA awards for climate research, according to people familiar with those discussions.

  NYT

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Every day

Sometimes twice.

Another outrageous act by the Trump administration.

David Legates, a University of Delaware professor of climatology who has spent much of his career questioning basic tenets of climate science, has been hired for a top position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

[...]

Legates has a long history of using his position as an academic scientist to publicly cast doubt on climate science. His appointment to NOAA comes as Americans face profound threats stoked by climate change, from the vast, deadly wildfires in the West to an unusually active hurricane season in the South and East.

[...]

In 2007, Legates was one of the authors of a paper that questioned previous findings about the role of climate change in destroying the habitat of polar bears. That research was partially funded by grants from Koch Industries, the lobbying group the American Petroleum Institute and ExxonMobil, according to InsideClimate News.

[...]

Legates also appeared in a video pushing the discredited theory that the sun is the cause of global warming. In testimony before the U.S. Senate in 2014, Legates argued that a climate science report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change erroneously stated that humans are causing global warming.

  NPR

Burn it all down.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Because your favorite president can't admit a mistake

Deputy Dawg was in the Sharpie scandal even though he was out of the country.

The Secretary of Commerce [Wilbur Ross] threatened to fire top employees at NOAA on Friday after the agency’s Birmingham office contradicted President Trump’s claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, according to three people familiar with the discussion.

That threat led to an unusual, unsigned statement later that Friday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disavowing the office’s own position that Alabama was not at risk. The reversal caused widespread anger within the agency and drew criticism from the scientific community that NOAA, a division of the Commerce Department, had been bent to political purposes.

[...]

Mr. Ross phoned Neil Jacobs, the acting administrator of NOAA, from Greece where the secretary was traveling for meetings and instructed Dr. Jacobs to fix the agency’s perceived contradiction of the president.

  NYT

Did Deputy Dawg get a phone call from Old Lardass?

Dr. Jacobs objected to the demand and was told that the political staff at NOAA would be fired if the situation was not fixed, according to the three individuals, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the episode. Unlike career government employees, political staff are appointed by the administration. They usually include a handful of top officials, such as Dr. Jacobs, and their aides.

Sadly, Dr. Jacobs didn't have the moral courage to refuse to debase himself.

[A] senior administration official who asked not to be identified when discussing internal deliberations said that the Birmingham office had been wrong and that NOAA had simply done the responsible thing and corrected the record.

That official suggested the Twitter post by the Birmingham forecasters had been motivated by a desire to embarrass the president more than concern for the safety of people in Alabama. The official provided no evidence to support that conclusion.

Another staffer thrown under the bus.

On Monday, Craig N. McLean, NOAA’s acting chief scientist, sent an email to staff members notifying the agency that he was looking into “potential violations” in the agency’s decision to ultimately back Mr. Trump’s statements rather than those of its own scientists. He called the agency’s action “a danger to public health and safety.”

At least somebody's got some integrity. He'll get fired, of course.

On Monday, the National Weather Service director, Louis W. Uccellini, got a standing ovation from [attendees at a weather industry conference in Huntsville, Alabama,] when he praised the work of the Birmingham office and said staff members there had acted “with one thing in mind, public safety” when they contradicted Mr. Trump’s claim that Alabama was at risk.

Courage is contagious.

Cue nasty tweets about the courageous scientists and the New York Times.

And impeach the motherfucker.

UPDATE:



There was no degrading to be done.  Wilbur Ross was already as low as a person can possibly get.

UPDATE:  Email letter from McLean

Excerpt:

As I'm sure you also know, there was a complex issue involving the President commenting on the path of the hurricane. The NWS Forecaster(s) corrected any public misunderstanding in an expert and timely way, as they should. There followed, last Friday, an unsigned press release from "NOAA" that inappropriately and incorrectly contradicted the NWS forecaster. My understanding is that this intervention to contradict the forecaster was not based on science but on external factors including reputation and appearance, or simply put, political. Our NOAA Scientific Integrity Policy and Code of Scientific Conduct make clear that all NOAA employees shall approach all scientific activities with honesty, objectively, and completely, without allegiance to individuals, organizations, or ideology. The content of this press release is very concerning as it compromises the ability of NOAA to convey life-saving information necessary to avoid substantial and specific danger to public health and safety. If the public cannot trust our information, or we debase our forecaster's warnings and products, that specific danger arises. 

 [...] 

In my role as Assistant Administrator for Research, and as I continue to administratively serve as Acting Chief Scientist, I am pursuing the potential violations of our NOAA Administrative Order on Scientific Integrity. Thankfully, we have such policies that are independently cited as among the best in the federal community, if not the best. Your NOAA and OAR management and leadership team believes in these policies and principles. I have a responsibility to pursue these truths. I will.

 

NOAA is now just another Trump service

Nearly a week before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration publicly backed President Trump over its own scientists, a top NOAA official warned its staff against contradicting the president.

In an agencywide directive sent Sept. 1 to National Weather Service personnel, hours after Trump asserted, with no evidence, that Alabama “would most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated,” staff was told to “only stick with official National Hurricane Center forecasts if questions arise from some national level social media posts which hit the news this afternoon.”

They were also told not to “provide any opinion,” according to a copy of the email obtained by The Washington Post.

A NOAA meteorologist who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution said the note, understood internally to be referring to Trump, came after the National Weather Service office in Birmingham contradicted Trump by tweeting Alabama would “NOT see any impacts from the hurricane.”

The Birmingham office sent the tweet after receiving a flurry of phone calls from concerned residents following Trump’s message.

[...]

“This is the first time I’ve felt pressure from above to not say what truly is the forecast,” the meteorologist said. “It’s hard for me to wrap my head around. One of the things we train on is to dispel inaccurate rumors and ultimately that is what was occurring — ultimately what the Alabama office did is provide a forecast with their tweet, that is what they get paid to do.”

  WaPo

Not any more, apparently.

Late Friday afternoon, NOAA officials further angered scientists within and beyond the agency by releasing a statement, attributed to an unnamed agency spokesperson, supporting Trump’s claims on Alabama and chastising the agency’s Birmingham meteorologists for speaking in absolutes.

That statement set off a firestorm among scientists, who attacked NOAA officials for bending to Trump’s will.

[...]

Keith Seitter, executive director of the American Meteorological Society, said in a statement that “the criticism of the Birmingham forecast office is unwarranted; rather they should have been commended for their quick action based on science in clearly communicating the lack of threat to the citizens of Alabama.”

[...]

“I have never been so embarrassed by NOAA. What they did is just disgusting,” Dan Sobien, president of the National Weather Service’s labor union, wrote on Twitter Friday. “Let me assure you the hard working employees of the NWS had nothing to do with the utterly disgusting and disingenuous tweet sent out by NOAA management tonight.”

[...]

Acting NOAA administrator Neil Jacobs was involved in drawing up the statement as was the NOAA director of public affairs, Julie Kay Roberts, who has experience in emergency management and worked on the president’s campaign.

The leadership of the Commerce Department, headed by Secretary Wilbur Ross, also approved the release, though Ross was out of the country at the time.

[...]

“It makes me speechless that the leadership would put [Trump’s] feelings and ego ahead of putting out weather information accurately,” said Michael Halpern, a deputy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “If we’re politicizing the weather what is there left to politicize? We’re seeing this kind of clamp down of scientists across the government, and it’s been an escalating trend.”

In 2018, a survey of scientists at 16 federal agencies found a culture of fear and self-censorship in an administration that has sidelined scientific evidence, especially as it related to climate change, in favor of political expediency.

Scientists are anathema to an authoritarian regime.

Burn it all down governance

The Navy has quietly stood down its Task Force Climate Change, created in 2009 to plan and develop "future public, strategic, and policy discussions" on the issue.

The task force ended in March, a spokesperson said, and the group's tab on the Navy's energy, environment and climate change website was removed sometime between March and July, according to public archives.

There is still a climate change link in the lower right corner of the site that led, at last check, to an empty page titled "Climate Change Fact Sheets."

Since it started, the TFCC released several reports on the strategic challenge climate change poses, taking a close look at what the melting Arctic means for strategic planning, and the dangers sea-level rise and extreme weather pose to many naval installations.

Alice Hill, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and former senior director for resilience on the National Security Council under President Obama, said she created a Department of Homeland Security task force modeled on the one created by the Navy.

[...]

In an email, the Navy spokesperson said the TFCC was ended because its processes are "now duplicative as functions have been transitioned to existing business processes; therefore, the original components of the task force are no longer needed."

  EE News

The DHS under Trump is going to seriously address climate change? And I'm the king of the world.

[Retired Navy Rear Adm. Jon White, who ran TFCC from 2012 to 2015, said] he sees "little evidence" that the task force's work has been fully incorporated into the Navy's decisionmaking process.

"Across all of [the Department of Defense], it is hard for me to see that climate change is taken as seriously at it should be," said White, who is currently president of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership. "The task force ended, in my opinion, without full incorporation of climate change considerations."

[...]

White said he is "suspicious" of how quietly the TFCC shut down, something that even he, as a former director, only heard about "third and fourth hand" as more of a rumor than actual fact.

[...]

"It's consistent with the patterns we've seen: Efforts with the title 'climate change' have either been suspended or renamed," Hill said.

"By not mentioning climate change, we are signaling the events that we're experiencing now, the impacts, are not something that immediately needs to be attended to and planned for," she added.

[...]

"It all goes back to the White House," White said. "That's what changed, the White House," he added.

White said the president's insistence that climate change is not a national security threat has led to a culture in Navy leadership where people either do not care enough about the matter or they are too afraid for their careers to fight for climate considerations.

"They don't want to get targeted by the administration; it's a battle they don't want to fight," he said.

It's amazing how many moral cowards are in high positions in this coutry.

Ten years ago, I left my job as a tenured university professor to work as an intelligence analyst for the federal government, primarily in the State Department but with an intervening tour at the National Intelligence Council. My focus was on the impact of environmental and climate change on national security, a growing concern of the military and intelligence communities.

[...]

I always appreciated the apolitical nature of the work. Our job in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was to generate intelligence analysis buttressed by the best information available, without regard to political considerations. And although I was uncomfortable with some policies of the Trump administration, no one had ever tried to influence my work or conclusions.

That changed last month, when the White House blocked the submission of my bureau’s written testimony on the national security implications of climate change to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The stated reason was that the scientific foundation of the analysis did not comport with the administration’s position on climate change.

[...]

Perhaps most important, this written testimony on a critical topic was never entered into the official record.

[...]

After an extended exchange between officials at the White House and the State Department, at the 11th hour I was permitted to appear at the hearing and give a five-minute summary of the 11-page testimony.

[...]

The intelligence community has repeatedly warned of the dangers that climate change poses to national security. Early this year, for instance, Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, warned in the annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment,” “Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.” ([In July, President Trump announced that Mr. Coats would step down shortly, to be replaced by one of his biggest defenders, Representative John Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican.)

In blocking the submission of the written testimony, the White House trampled not only on the scientific integrity of the assessment but also on the analytic independence of an arm of the intelligence community. That’s why I recently resigned from the job I considered a sacred duty, and the institution I loved.

[...]

My last day on the job was July 12. In the weeks since the hearing I came to understand that there was little left for me to achieve in my position. More than most officers in the intelligence community, I interacted often with the public in discussions of environmental security issues. After the experiences of the prior two months, I wondered whether I could continue public engagements without being tainted by questions about my own analytic independence.

[...]

We need to better understand and anticipate the challenges facing the nation and its partners. Whatever my next step might be, I believe these issues remain critical, and I will try to continue this work going forward.

  Rod Schoonover @ NYT

And....from former NOAA chief David Titley:






...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The serious side of Sharpiegate

This is insane and dangerous.  We are all at risk as long as Trump is president.

Impeach the motherfucker.

UPDATE:





UPDATE 9/8:

From former NOAA chief:

Worse than Double's bunch - by a long shot

The head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently floated removing climate change from the agency’s mission.

Rear Adm. Timothy Gallaudet gave the idea in a presentation to a summit organized by the Commerce Department, NOAA’s parent agency.

  The Hill

Why am I not surprised?

In the presentation, revealed by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), Gallaudet suggested also adding “reducing the seafood trade deficit” to NOAA’s mission, as part of an effort to substantially boost the commercial fishing industry.

So the scientific agency charged with understanding and dealing with oceans - and therefore climate - doesn't need to concern itself with climate change, but with trade and commerce? Sure, that makes perfect sense.  Why is NOAA under the Commerce Department anyway?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

What Did You Expect?

President Trump made his pick to run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week, and Barry Myers, CEO of weather firm AccuWeather, is already causing a storm.

A lawyer by training, Myers would be the first nonscientist to head NOAA in decades and, despite his experience working in weather, he lacks expertise in the agency’s other research areas, including climate change, endangered species, fisheries, and marine sanctuaries.

  NY Magazine

So unlike his other appointments, eh?

Myers continues Trump’s pattern of topping government agencies with people who are openly hostile to the agency’s mission. Think Betsy DeVos at the Education Department, Scott Pruitt at the EPA, and Rick Perry at the Department of Energy. Myers’s opposition to a portion of NOAA’s work is clear and on the record. More than a decade ago, he supported a bill that would have prevented the National Weather Service from making forecasts available online, a service that competed with those offered by his companies.

[...]

“He actively lobbied to privatize the National Weather Service, which works day in and day out to protect the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans, to benefit his own company’s bottom line.”

[...]

But before Myers worries about budgets, he needs to worry about Democrats in the Senate, who are already expressing skepticism over his nomination. “Mr. Myers will have to work very hard to persuade me that he will run NOAA for the public good,” Hawaii senator Brian Schatz said.

Florida Democrat Bill Nelson expressed unease too, telling the Post, “We can’t afford to have someone in this position that might be tempted to feather their own nest by privatizing the National Weather Service.”

Oh, bullshit. You know you're going to approve the appointment. You always do.

And, by the way, AccuWeather isn't always that accurate.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.