Climate Dog Not Barking:
Climate change policy is mostly driven by climate models.
But we never see the news even ATTEMPTING to interview any climate model makers and asking hard questions about their data and assumptions.
Therefore, eliminating the budget of a climate agency is common sense. They are always welcome to send their model-makers to podcasts and change our minds.
Trump Team Looks to Drastically Cut Weather and Climate Agency NOAA | Scott Waldman & E&E News, Scientific American
Mass layoffs at the U.S. climate and weather agency would have a ripple effect across the economy, say former NOAA officials
The Trump administration is looking to halve the NOAA workforce, say two former officials of the agency, a member of Congress and a congressional staff member.
The draconian cut, they say — which would reduce the number of NOAA employees from about 12,000 to 6,000 — threatens to cripple an agency that provides climate and weather information across the U.S. economy.
"The goal is to just crush [it] with a hammer, hard blows, and shrink that federal workforce," said Craig McLean, who served as the assistant administrator of NOAA Research until he retired in 2022 after a 40-year career at the agency. "There really isn't any consideration about what the mission impact is."
NOAA’s products include the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center. It manages the nation’s fisheries. Its free streams of data are widely used by scientists, governments and businesses around the globe. NOAA also is one of the world’s leading climate science agencies, which has long made it a target for conservatives and the fossil fuel industry.
The changes under consideration suggest the Trump team may be following the Project 2025 conservative policy proposal for NOAA. The document, written as a playbook for a second Trump administration, calls for NOAA to be “broken up and downsized” largely because of its climate change research.
The looming cuts to NOAA's workforce are being communicated to agency staff verbally, say congressional sources and former NOAA officials. That's intended to avoid putting it in a written memo or email that can be leaked.
But the officials cautioned that — while the proposal to halve the workforce has been discussed — it also could be an intimidation tactic to pressure more employees to take up the administration's offer to resign early, which expires Monday.
The proposal also calls for a 30 percent reduction in NOAA's budget.
McLean said mass cuts at the agency would have a ripple effect across the U.S. economy.
NOAA conducts ground-breaking climate research but it also provides invaluable information to a variety of U.S. business interests, he said. McLean said NOAA's products “benefit the finance community, the reinsurers, real estate, transportation, agriculture and all these different industries.” It also helps the oil and gas sector.
Losing that data or even compromising it because of staff shortages would be devastating, he said.
“The products that NOAA generates are not just so that I know whether my tractor is going to get wet tomorrow and I got to cover it before I plow the field, but what should I be planting next year, and what is this coming season going to do for me,” he said. “All that stuff is all based on NOAA outlooks, forecasts, oceanography and atmospheric sciences.”
McLean was demoted from his position as acting chief scientist at NOAA in the first Trump administration after he launched an investigation into senior NOAA officials following the "Sharpiegate" scandal. His inquiry was to examine whether they adhered to proper scientific integrity rules.
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