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Trump Administration Will Close Major Center for Research on Climate Change

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2025 //
3

The Trump administration is engaged in a war against science and medicine. It has eliminated funding in many crucial areas of research conducted by universities and by the National Institutes of Health. Incalculable damage has been done to set back the search for cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, infectious diseases, HIV, respiratory diseases, and pediatric cancer. People will die because of the ignorance of those who close down ongoing, vital research.

Trump has consistently claimed that “climate change” is a hoax. He has said that the term “climate change” refers to the weather. He hates wind farms and has cut federal funding for them. He has hated wind farms since wind turbines were built near his Trump International Golf Links in Scotland. He sued to block them but repeatedly lost.

Now he is closing down a major hub of climate research.

The New York Times reported:

The Trump administration said it will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions.

The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters around the country, and its scientists study a broad range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming.

But in a social media post announcing the move late on Tuesday, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, called the center “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and said that the federal government would be “breaking up” the institution.

Mr. Vought wrote that a “comprehensive review is underway” and that “any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”

USA Today first reported on the White House plans.

Scientists, meteorologists and lawmakers said the move was an attack on critical scientific research and would harm the United States.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research was originally founded to provide scientists studying Earth’s atmosphere with cutting-edge resources, such as supercomputers, that individual universities could not afford on their own. It is now widely considered a global leader in both weather and climate change research, with programs aimed at tracking severe weather events, modeling floods and understanding how solar activity affects the Earth’s atmosphere.

The center’s research has often proved useful in unexpected places, such as when its studies of downdrafts in the lower atmosphere in the 1970s and 1980s led to development of wind shear detection systems around airports that helped address the cause of hundreds of aviation accidents during that era.

Categories Environment, Evil, Extremism, Medicine, Research, Science, Stupid, Trump

Jennifer Rubin: Why Donald Trump Will Never Win the Nobel Peace Prize

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2025 //
21

Jennifer Rubin was one of the best columnists at The Washington Post. She left soon after Jeff Bezos began meddling into the views of the editorial pages. Rubin was hired by the Post originally to be the newspaper’s conservative voice. But after Trump was elected in 2016, her political views changed. Trump turned her into a keen-eyed liberal.

Rubin launched a wildly successful Substack blog called The Contrarian, which offers essays and conversations by her and other journalists and scholars.

She wrote yesterday about Trump’s open campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize and how the Nobel Committee may have trolled Trump by the language of this year’s awards.

Trump currently is enjoying well-deserved plaudits for bringing about a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of all Israeli hostages.

Trouble lies ahead, however, because under the agreement, Hamas is supposed to disarm and withdraw from governing Gaza. However, Hamas shows no willingness to give up their authority or their weapons. They were videotaped murdering their Palestinian rivals in public. When asked about these public executions, Trump said that Hamas was merely punishing some “very bad gangs.”

Trump very likely brokered a peace deal with two strategies: 1) his personal economic ties to Arab potentates; 2) his threat to Hamas to let Netanyahu do whatever he wanted in Gaza unless they signed the deal.

Rubin wrote in The Contrarian about the implicit messages that the Nobel committee sent to Trump in their awards.

The Nobel Prize Committee announced its annual awards over the last week or so. Aside from the number of winners based at U.S. universities (which have been until now the crown jewel of our education and scientific communities), something else caught my attention: Are the Nobel Prize judges…trolling Donald Trump?

I have no doubt the awards—the culmination of a long and rigorous process—are apolitical and entirely well deserved. However, what the committee said about the prizes and how the winners’ work were described certainly highlight Trump’s ignorance and malevolence. If you are going to shine a light on brilliance and excellence, Trump is going to be left in the dark—and others will notice.

Nobel Committee chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes was explicitly asked about Trump’s clamoring for the Peace Prize. “In the long history of the Nobel Peace Prize, I think this committee has seen many types of campaign, media attention,” Frydnes said. In other words, they are used to getting nagged. He continued: “This committee sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates and that room is filled with both courage and integrity. So, we base only our decision on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel.” Hmm. Sounds like Trump fared poorly in comparison to all those men and women esteemed for courage and integrity.

The explanation of the award itself seemed even more pointed. “The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 to Maria Corina Machado,” the committee explained. “She is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” [Emphasis added here and below.] Democracy surely was front and center (with a notable reminder that it exists in conflict with dictatorship). In fact, democracy was mentioned in more detail and with greater fervor than peace itself.

The statement about Machado read: “As the leader of the democracy movement in Venezuela….” She was credited with leading the opposition demanding “free elections and representative government.” The committee explained:

This is precisely what lies at the heart of democracy: our shared willingness to defend the principles of popular rule, even though we disagree. At a time when democracy is under threat, it is more important than ever to defend this common ground.

The regime she opposed is described in language you would (or will, on Saturday) hear at a No King’s Day rally: “a brutal, authoritarian state,” where the few at the top enrich themselves, where “violent machinery of the state is directed against the country’s own citizens,” battling an opposition “systematically suppressed by means of election rigging, legal prosecution and imprisonment.”

And in case anyone had missed the point:

Democracy is a precondition for lasting peace. However, we live in a world where democracy is in retreat, where more and more authoritarian regimes are challenging norms and resorting to violence. The Venezuelan regime’s rigid hold on power and its repression of the population are not unique in the world. We see the same trends globally: rule of law abused by those in control, free media silenced, critics imprisoned, and societies pushed towards authoritarian rule and militarization. In 2024, more elections were held than ever before, but fewer and fewer are free and fair.

Maybe this was not intended to poke Trump in the eye—and the statement is accurate without any consideration of him—but condemnation of his tactics and outlook are the inevitable result of an award that elevates democracy, the rule of law, fair elections, and a free media. Since Trump antagonizes all those things, the award winners’ opponents sound an awful lot like Trump.

Trump prosecutes his perceived enemies, sets the American military against Americans, blows ships out of the water and murders those on board without due process, bullies the media, and seeks to rig elections. In other words, he embodies all the things Maria Corina Machado and other deserving winners fight against. So long as he continues doing all those things (i.e. so long as he remains Trump), he will continue bearing a disturbing resemblance to the other authoritarians around the globe—and will therefor never receive the award he has so openly whined about deserving. (Buckle up, however. Speaker of the House and go-to sycophant Mike Johnson, instead of working to find a compromise and assist in re-opening our government, is reportedly devoting his time and efforts to getting Trump his prize in 2026. Good luck with that.)

Trump, his lackeys, and his cultish cheering section seem not to understand that “peace” is not simply the absence of war. Conquest also achieves the end of some wars. But that is not what we are after. Peace, rather, requires renunciation of violence in favor of democratic and humanistic values. Only then do you have a lasting peace during which human beings can flourish.

The Peace Prize was not the only award that sounded like an anti-Trump recitation. Consider one of the three Nobel Prize winners for economics: Phillipe Aghion, a French economist and ½ of the winning team with Peter Howitt of Brown University. The Guardian reported:

[He] warned that “dark clouds” were gathering amid increasing barriers to trade and openness fueled by Donald Trump’s trade wars. He also said innovation in green industries, and blocking the rise of giant tech monopolies would be vital to stronger growth in future.

“I’m not welcoming the protectionist wave in the US, and that’s not good for world growth and innovation,” he said.

To be clear, I don’t think he and the other winners received their awards because they sound like a rebuttal to Trump. Rather, Trump is so invariably, deeply, and consistently wrong on economics that anyone recognized for merit invariably will contradict his irrational, ignorant views.

In all likelihood, Nobel folks did not set out to troll Trump. But if you are going to celebrate peace—real peace, and the democracy it depends upon—alongside the keys to economic growth (free trade, scientific discovery, dynamic and free societies), then you are going to find yourself sounding like the retort to MAGA authoritarian, know-nothingism.

This year’s Nobel prize committee wound up illustrating the degree to which Trump is inimical to peace, progress, and prosperity. The committee should earn a prize for that.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Environment, Ethics, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Justice, Trump

Jack Hassard: What Happens When You Can’t Trust Government Data?

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2025 //
9

What happens when government data are politicized? What happens when a President fires the professionals who report the data and replace them with his loyalists?

Jack Hassard, a retired professor of science education at Georgia State University, knows what happens. Hassard followed Trump’s behavior in his first term and wrote a book called The Trump Files.

The problem with Trump has accelerated now that he is surrounded by a well-organized cabal of far-right extremists who are turning him into a dictator.

Dear Jack,1

I was eight the last time the numbers were real.

Every Friday, my mother would check the Bureau of Labor Statistics dashboard. She did this the way some families checked the weather. She was quiet and anxious, with a hand on the mouse and a furrow in her brow. The numbers told her how many people had lost work that week. They showed how fast prices were rising. The data revealed whether the rent hikes were outpacing wages again. It was her way of listening for distant thunder. Today, nevertheless, the BLS dashboard is not updating information because of the Republican led government shutdown.

The dashboard went dark the spring Trump returned to power. At first we thought it was just another funding fight, like the ones that had knocked websites offline before. But weeks passed, and the updates never came back. My mother kept refreshing the page for months, like a ritual for a ghost.

By the end of that summer, more pages were vanishing. Climate dashboards froze mid-storm season. Food insecurity surveys were “postponed indefinitely.” Vaccine data disappeared without explanation. By winter, it was as if the country had decided to stop looking at itself in the mirror.

They called it austerity. They said it was about cutting “red tape” and “freeing the agencies from bloated bureaucracy.” But everyone could feel the chill. It wasn’t just numbers that were being cut. It was the nerves that told us where the pain was.

We didn’t realize it at the time. This was how the silence began. It began not with censorship in the usual sense but with a subtraction of knowledge.

When the data stopped, arguments stopped making sense. People clung to whatever numbers their preferred networks fed them, like castaways grabbing driftwood. One station would say unemployment was rising; another insisted we were in a “golden age.” Both cited “official sources,” but the sources were gone, hollowed out or replaced by Trump’s loyalists.

At school, the teachers tried to explain inflation, but the charts they used were months out of date. Some parents started printing memes as evidence. Others stopped trusting the schools entirely.

Looking back, it’s astonishing how quickly civic discourse disintegrated once the shared factual floor cracked. We had thought democracy died in coups or riots. Instead, it died in data voids—quiet gaps that widened into abysses.

My father used to call it “the silence before the storm.” Storms were his touchstone for everything. He said the scariest part wasn’t the wind or the rain. It was the moment the air went unnaturally still. You realized the warning systems had failed.

That silence descended over our public life. When pollution monitoring sites shut down, a chemical spill in Savannah went undetected for weeks. By the time the numbers surfaced through a university backchannel, children were already sick. When the food insecurity survey was cut, hunger surged invisibly. Relief programs couldn’t track where the need was worst.

And when climate data went dark, the storms didn’t stop. They just stopped being predictable. The year the NOAA dashboards froze was the year the Atlantic hurricanes changed course mid-season. Thousands died inland, where no one expected them.

The silence didn’t come from ignorance. It came from a deliberate decision to turn off the lights.

I know you study this era, Jack, so you know the official explanations: budget cuts, “efficiency reforms,” sovereignty rhetoric. But those were just alibis. Trump understood something that too many defenders of democracy underestimated: data is power. Whoever controls the ability to measure reality controls the terms of debate.

His war on data wasn’t chaotic—it was methodical. Fire the agency heads who produce inconvenient statistics. Defund the surveys that expose inequality. Gut the climate monitors that contradict your conspiracies. Let loyal media amplify your alternate “facts.” Over time, the shared reality collapses, and the strongman narrative becomes the only stable frame left.

Categories Data, Democracy, Disruption, Environment, Evil, Extremism, Health, History, Lies, Science, Trump

Trump Excoriates the United Nations, Praises Himself, Mocks Climate Change

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2025 //
18

Trump spoke at the United Nations today, where he put his personal opinions, his arrogance, and his vanity on display.

ABC reported:

President Donald Trump delivered a combative speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday morning, lambasting the international body while touting the work of his administration.

Trump spared no criticism in the hourlong address, beginning with his predecessor former President Joe Biden before taking aim at world leaders on everything from migration to the Russia-Ukraine war.

“One year ago, our country was in deep trouble. But today, just eight months into my administration, we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world, and there is no other country even close,” he said at the top of his remarks.

Trump touted the U.S. as having the “strongest” borders, military and relationships around the world.

The president then turned his attention the United Nations, accusing it of not living up to its promise and even accused it of bringing on more problems.

“What is the purpose of the United Nations?” Trump asked. “It has such tremendous, tremendous potential. But it’s not even coming close to living up to that potential. For the most part, at least for now, all they seem to do is write a really strongly-worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It’s empty words and empty words don’t solve war. The only thing that solves war and wars is action.”

Trump accused the organization of ignoring conflicts around the world that he says he solved, casting himself as a peacemaker.

“Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize for each one of these achievements,” Trump said. “But for me, the real prize will be the sons and daughters who lived to grow up with their mothers and fathers because millions of people are no longer being killed in endless and inglorious wars.”

Richard Drew/AP – PHOTO: President Donald Trump addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, in New York City, Sept. 23, 2025. 

Trump threatens Russia sanctions, but says Europe must do more

Trump said the United States is prepared to enforce a “very strong round of powerful tariffs” on Russia should Moscow not be ready to make a peace deal.

But he said other countries need to pull back on buying Russian oil and energy products “otherwise we’re all wasting a lot of time.”

“Europe has to step it up. They can’t be doing what they’re doing. They’re buying oil and gas from Russia while they’re fighting Russia. It’s embarrassing to them,” Trump said.

Trump also took a moment to criticize China and India, calling them the main sponsors of the war in Ukraine because of their purchases of Russian oil.

The president has threatened for months to impose harsher economic penalties on Russia but has yet to do so. He didn’t say on Tuesday what it would take for him to determine Russia doesn’t want peace, though he said the war is “not making Russia look good, it’s making them look bad.”

Jeenah Moon/Reuters – PHOTO: President Donald Trump addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, in New York City, Sept. 23, 2025. 

Trump bashes world leaders on migration, green energy

Trump said other countries should be modeling the U.S. on the issue of immigration.

“Not only is the U.N. not solving the problems it should, too often it’s actually creating new problems for us to solve,” Trump said. “The best example is the No. 1 political issue of our time, the crisis of uncontrolled migration. It’s uncontrolled. Your countries are being ruined.”

To leaders gathered in the conference hall, Trump said: “Your countries are going to hell.”

He also encouraged leaders to reject policies geared toward fighting climate change and global warming, calling climate change “the greatest con job ever” and touting his administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.

“If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail,” Trump said.

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters – PHOTO: President Donald Trump addresses the 80th United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York City, September 23, 2025. 

Trump demands Hamas release hostages, disagrees on Palestinian statehood

On Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, Trump said the world has to “come together” to “end the war in Gaza.” He reiterated that he wanted to see the hostages released immediately, but offered no clear path forward on progressing negotiations.

Trump continued to express his disagreement with countries moving to recognize Palestinian statehood. Several key U.S. allies, most recently France, have announced they are recognizing a Palestinian state.

“Now, as if to encourage continued conflict, some of this body is seeking to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. The rewards would be too great for Hamas terrorists for their atrocities,” Trump said.

Trump instead called for a united message from the body for Hamas to release hostages.

“Those who want peace should be united with one message: release the hostages now. Just release the hostages now. Thank you,” Trump said.

Trump also boasted about his poll numbers, which he said were the highest ever. His approval rating is 37%.

Categories Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Immigration, International, Trump

RFK Jr. Fires Scientist Studying Environmental Causes of Autism

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2025 //
7

ProPublica exposed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a complete phony and know-nothing. He claims that he will get to the root causes of autism. He has said for decades that the singular cause of autism is vaccines.

But he fired the scientist studying environmental causes of autism and dismantled her program.

He won’t rest until he can find a scientist who agrees with him. That’s not how science works. It’s based on experimental evidence, not ideology.

ProPublica wrote:

Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase in the condition and vowed to gather “the most credible scientists from all over the world” to solve the mystery.

Nothing like that has ever been done before, he told an interviewer. 

McCanlies was stunned. The work had been done. 

“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing!” she said to her husband, Fred.

As an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which Kennedy oversees, McCanlies had spent much of the past two decades studying how parents’ exposure to workplace chemicals affects the chance that they will have a child with autism. Just three weeks earlier, she’d been finalizing her fourth major paper on the topic when Kennedy eliminated her entire division. Kennedy has also overseen tens of millions of dollars in cuts to federal funding for research on autism, including its environmental causes.

For 20 years, Kennedy has espoused the debunked theory that autism is caused by vaccines, dismissing evidence to the contrary by arguing that vaccine manufacturers, researchers and regulators all have an interest in obscuring their harms.

He remains skeptical of the scientists who have been funded by his own agency to study the neurodevelopmental condition. “We need to stop trusting the experts,” he told right-wing host Tucker Carlson in a June interview, going on to suggest that previous studies that found no relationship between vaccines and autism were marred by “trickery” and researchers’ self-interest.

In contrast, Kennedy told Carlson that under his leadership, and with a new, federally funded $50 million autism research initiative, “We’re going to get real studies done for the first time.”

Some autism researchers fear that the effort will manipulate data to blame the condition on vaccines. “Kennedy has never expressed an open mind, an open attitude towards what are the fundamental causes of autism,” said Helen Tager-Flusberg, a Boston University psychologist who founded a coalition of scientists concerned about his approach to autism. In a June statement, the group said the initiative lacks transparency and that Kennedy “casually ignores decades of high quality research that preceded his oversight.”

As Kennedy promotes his new initiative, ProPublica has found that he has also taken aim at the traditional scientific approach to autism, shutting down McCanlies’ lab and stripping funding from more than 50 autism-related studies. Meanwhile, he has stood by as the Trump administration encourages the departure of hundreds of federal employees with experience studying the harm caused by environmental threats and rolls back protections from pollution and chemicals, including some linked to autism…

The article goes on to describe the important research conducted by McCanlies and her colleagues at NIOSH into the relationship between exposure to certain toxins and autism.

Secretary Kennedy was obviously ignorant of the work these scientists had been doing for years on causes of autism.

The researchers were pleased to know that the toxins they had identified as related to autism were banned by the Environmental Protection Agency. But then came the shocking news that EPA leader Lee Zeldin was removing restrictions on some of the worst chemicals.

Meanwhile, Kennedy seems determined to establish a causal link between vaccines and autism. This theory has been thoroughly debunked by scientists.

Categories Environment, Health, Science

Florida Federal Judge Orders “Alligator Alcatraz” to Close for Environmental Reasons

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2025 //
7

Trump, Kristi Noem, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have had a good time opening up and celebrating an immigrant detention facility that they call “Alligator Alcatraz.” They boast that immigrants who try to escape will be killed by alligators or snakes in the Everglades.

But the New York Times reported late Thursday that a federal judge ordered that the prison be shut down within the next 60 days because it endangers the environment. Judge Kathleen M. Williams was appointed by President Obama.

A federal judge in Miami gave the state of Florida 60 days to clear out the immigrant detention facility called Alligator Alcatraz, handing environmentalists and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians a win after they clashed with Gov. Ron DeSantis over the environmental impacts the makeshift site was having in the federally protected Everglades.

The ruling late Thursday from U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, which forbids state officials from moving any other migrants there, deals a blow to what had become a marquee symbol of President Donald Trump’s immigration policy.
The environmentalists who sued called it “a huge relief for millions of people who love the Everglades.”

“This brutal detention center was burning a hole in the fabric of life that supports our most iconic wetland and a whole host of endangered species, from majestic Florida panthers to wizened wood storks,” attorney Elise Bennett of the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement. “The judge’s order came just in time to stop it all from unraveling.”

The state filed a notice of appeal with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals less than an hour after the judge issued her order. DeSantis did not immediately comment.

Judge Kathleen M. Williams of the Federal District Court in Miami found that the state and federal governments had violated a federal law that requires an environmental review before any major federal construction project. Judge Williams partly granted a preliminary injunction sought by environmentalists and the Miccosukee Tribe, whose members live in the area. The detention center is surrounded by protected lands that form part of the sensitive Everglades ecological system.

The detention center presents risks to wetlands and to communities that depend on the Everglades for their water supply, including the Miccosukee, Judge Williams found.

“The project creates irreparable harm in the form of habitat loss and increased mortality to endangered species in the area,” she wrote.

Her ruling is preliminary, as the case will continue to be litigated. The state is expected to ask that the ruling be stayed, or kept from taking effect, as it pursues its appeal.

The Trump administration had argued that a review under the National Environmental Policy Act did not apply because while the center houses federal immigration detainees, it is run by the state. At the same time, the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis argued that its authority to operate the detention center came from an agreement with the federal government delegating some immigration enforcement powers to Florida.

In her ruling, Judge Williams said federal immigration enforcement is the “key driver” of the detention center’s construction. Because it is subject to federal funding, standards and direction, it is also subject to federal environmental laws, she concluded. 

In making that determination, the judge wrote, the court will “‘adhere to the time-tested adage: If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it’s a duck.’”

Categories Cruelty, DeSantis, Environment, Extremism, Florida, Trump

Rachel Maddow: Our Worst Fears Have Come True

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2025 //
5

This is one of Rachel Maddow’s best clips. She says that we worried about what Trump might do if he won re-election. Wonder no more. It is happening. He is a full-fledged authoritarian, intent on smashing the Constitution and our rights. what can we do? She has some ideas.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Disruption, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Funding, Immigration, Trump

Environmental Protection Agency Fires Hundreds of Scientists, Stops Research

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2025 //
11

The New York Times reported this afternoon that the Trump administration has put the Environmental Protection Agency into reverse gear. Its leader, Lee Zeldin, was previously a Congressman representing the East End of Long Island, one of the most ecologically fragile places in the U.S.

The Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday that it would eliminate its scientific research arm and begin firing hundreds of chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists, after denying for months that it intended to do so.

The move underscores how the Trump administration is forging ahead with efforts to slash the federal work force and dismantle federal agencies after the Supreme Court allowed these plans to proceed while legal challenges unfold. Government scientists have been particular targets of the administration’s large-scale layoffs.

The decision to dismantle the E.P.A.’s Office of Research and Development had been widely expected since March, when a leaked document that called for eliminating the office was first reported by The New York Times. But until Friday, the Trump administration maintained that no final decisions had been made.

The E.P.A.’s science office provides the independent research that underpins nearly all of the agency’s policies and regulations. It has analyzed the risks of hazardous chemicals, the impact of wildfire smoke on public health and the contamination of drinking water by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Its research has often justified stricter environmental rules, prompting pushback from chemical manufacturers and other industries.

Categories Environment, Extremism, Research, Science, Trump

Ted Cruz Slashed NOAA Funding for Weather Forecasting in Trump Budget

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2025 //
12

Since the disaster in Texas, where more than 100 lives were lost to a flash flood in the middle of the night, Senator Ted Cruz has been readily available to comment for every television camera.

He has warned Democrats and Republicans alike not to politicize the tragic events (forgetting that Republicans pounced on the Los Angeles fires to blame Democrats and DEI as the 98-mile-an-hour winds were still spreading disaster. They blamed Mayor Karen Bass [who is female and Black], they blamed the female leaders of the LA Fire Department, they blamed Governor Gavin Newsom for refusing to turn on an imaginary faucet in Northern California).

What Cruz has not mentioned is that he inserted a cut into Trump’s Big Ugly Bill that slashed $150 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget for forecasting the weather.

The Guardian reported:

“There’s no doubt afterwards we are going to have a serious retrospective as you do after any disaster and say, ‘OK what could be done differently to prevent this disaster?’” Cruz told Fox News. “The fact you have girls asleep in their cabins when flood waters are rising, something went wrong there. We’ve got to fix that and have a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way.”

The National Weather Service has faced scrutiny in the wake of the disaster after underestimating the amount of rainfall that was dumped upon central Texas, triggering floods that caused the deaths and about $20bn in estimated economic damages. Late-night alerts about the dangerous floods were issued by the service but the timeliness of the response, and coordination with local emergency services, will be reviewed by officials.

But before his Grecian holiday, Cruz ensured a reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (Noaa) efforts to improve future weather forecasting of events that cause the sort of extreme floods that are being worsened by the human-caused climate crisis.

Cruz inserted language into the Republicans’ “big beautiful” reconciliation bill, before its signing by Donald Trump on Friday, that eliminates a $150m fund to “accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public” around weather forecasting.

Cruz was vacationing in Greece with his family when the flood occurred. A few years ago, when the power grid in Texas collapsed during a bitter cold spell, Cruz and family were on their way to Cancun. Maybe he should put out public alerts about his vacations so we can all be prepared for disasters.

Politifact debunked the claim that Trump totally defunded NOAA and the National Weather Service, it acknowledged that cuts were made (at the insistence of DOGE).

“While the administration has not defunded the NWS or NOAA, it is proposing in 2026 to cut significant research arms of the agency, including the Office of Atmospheric Research, a major hot bed of research,” Matt Lanza, Houston-based meteorologist and editor of The Eyewall, a hurricane and extreme weather website, told PolitiFact. “Multiple labs that produce forecasting tools and research used to improve forecasting would also be impacted. The reorganization that’s proposed would decimate NOAA’s research capability.” 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Environment, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Stupid, Texas

Trump’s Energy Department Hires Climate Change Deniers

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2025 //
0

Is the climate changing? Most scientists who study the environment believe that it is. They agree that human-caused pollution degrades the climate and that the health of the planet requires less reliance on fossil fuels. The Biden Administration passed landmark legislation to encourage the transition from oil and gas to electricity. Trump has rolled back whatever he could of Biden’s contribution to green energy. No more tax credits for electric vehicles or solar panels. Every program that promotes green energy has been dismantled.

The New York Times reported that the Department of Energy has added three scientists to its roster who are known for their criticism of mainstream climate science. The Secretary of Energy is Chris Wright, an entrepreneur who was CEO of Liberty Energy.

The Energy Department has hired at least three scientists who are well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.

The scientists are listed in the Energy Department’s internal email system as current employees of the agency, the records show. They are Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled”; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming; and Roy Spencer, a meteorologist who believes that clouds have had a greater influence on warming than humans have.

Their hiring comes after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change is affecting the country. The administration has also systematically removed mentions of climate change from government websites while slashing federal funding for research on global warming.

In addition, Trump officials have been recruiting scientists to help them repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which determined that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare, and which now underpins much of the government’s legal authority to slow global warming, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly…

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, expressed alarm that the Energy Department had hired the three scientists.

“What this says is that the administration has no respect for the actual science, which overwhelmingly points in the direction of a growing crisis as we continue to warm the planet through fossil-fuel burning, the consequences of which we’ve seen play out in recent weeks in the form of deadly heat domes and floods here in the U.S.,” Dr. Mann wrote in an email.

Dr. Mann added that the Trump administration appeared to have fired hundreds of “actual government science experts” and replaced them with “a small number of reliable foot soldiers.”

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said it would be troubling if these three scientists were involved in repealing the 2009 endangerment finding, which cleared the way for the government to regulate the planet-warming gases emitted by cars, power plants and other industrial sources.

Categories Biden, Environment, Extremism, Science, Trump
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