Trump Administration Breaking Up Renowned Climate Center; Retribution Against Colorado Governor Suspected

The National Center for Atmospheric Research in
Boulder, Colorado. The Trump administration
wants to break it up saying the scientists there
are "climate alarmists" with no evidence to back
that up. It appears the announcement might
be related to Colorado refusing to release
from jail a 2020 election conspiracy theorist.

One of the world's leading climate research centers, in Boulder, Colorado, is targeted for closing because Donald Trump has his head in the sand. 

And also probably because he's still butthurt that Colorado won't release a 2020 election conspiracy theorist from jail.

At issue is the National Center For Atmospheric Research, or NCAR. It was founded in 1960 and has resources like supercomputers, data sets and high-tech research planes that conduct meteorological and climate research. It's also an educational center for future scientists. 

As you'd expect, scientists are almost uniformly outraged by the plan to dismantle NCAR. 

Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University professor and chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, called the center "quite literally our global mothership," and said "Dismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet."

Hayhoe also said on her post on the social media platform X: 

"(NCAR) supports the scientists who fly into hurricanes, the meteorologists who developed new radar technology, the physicists who envision and code new weather models and yes, the largest community climate model in the world" 

Casper Amman, a former research scientist at NCAR, told the Washington Post the center plays a unique role by bringing together soiled specialists to collaborate on some of the biggest climate and weather questions of our time. 

"Without NCAR, a lot could not happen....A lot of research at U.S. Universities would immediately get hampered, industry would lose access to reliable base data."

Weather and climate services around the world use NCAR modeling and forecasting tools. It also supplies real time data to people dealing with events like big wildfires and floods. 

Of course, the Trump camp has a completely different view about their plans to dismantle NCAR.

 Here's a Trump minion on X:

"The National Science Foundation will be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado......This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country."

One of Trump's favorite whines is climate change. Every chance he gets, he says climate change is a hoax and a con job, his words. He apparently thinks that he's smarter than the vast majority of scientists who tell us climate change is real. Those scientists are growing increasingly alarmed about that warming. 

 USA Today, which first reported this development, reported:

"The administration plans to identify and eliminate what it calls 'green new scam research activities' during an upcoming review of the center, according to the White House while 'vital functions' such as weather modeling and supercomputing will be moved to another entity or location. 

Efforts to dissolve the National Center for Atmospheric Research will begin immediately, the official said, with the plan being to fully close the center's Mesa Laboratory in Boulder."

NCAR's staff consists of 830 employees who are part of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a nonprofit consortium of more than 130 colleges and universities. Those universities focus on earth system sciences. We don't yet know how many jobs or programs this dismantling would affect.

THE REAL REASON

There's almost certainly more to all this than just Trump's aversion to any true information about climate change. Trump's focus seems to be suddenly all about Colorado 

 As USA Today reports:

"The move to break up the National Center for Atmospheric Research comes after the Trump administration earlier in the day announced the cancellation of $109 million environmentally focused transportation grants in Colorado that sought to boost electric vehicles, rail improvement and research into hydrogen and natural gas-powered trains."

Amid these announcements, and on the same day the NCAR breakup was announced, Trump called Polis "weak and pathetic" and "incompetent" because he refused to release former Colorado County Clerk Tina Peters from prison.

And there it is: Revenge. 

Peters was once the top election official in Mesa County. She's part of the election 2020 conspiracy gang, convinced the election that year was "stolen" by the Joe Biden campaign. There's no evidence that ever happened. 

Eventually, in 2024,  a Colorado jury convicted Peters of giving Trump supporters unauthorized access to a voting machine after the 2020 election. She's serving a nine-year sentence on those state charges. 

Recently, Trump said he is pardoning Peters. There's one teeny, tiny problem with that. The president can only pardon people who were convicted on federal charges and are in federal prisons.

Peters was convicted on charges brought by the State of Colorado and is in a state prison. 

"Tina Peters was convicted guy a jury of her peers, prosecuted by a Republican District Attorney and found guilty of violating Colorado state laws, including criminal impersonation. No President has jurisdiction over state law more the power to parse a person for state convictions," said Colorado Gov. Jared Polis. 

How dare Polis stand up to Glorious Leader Trump!  So the Trump people brought out their usual mob boss schtick. "Nice state ya got there. Would be a shame to see anything happen to it."

Here's the quote to prove it:

"'Maybe if Colorado had a governor who actually wanted to work with President Trump his constituent would be better served,' a senior White House official told NOTUS in an email on Wednesday."

NOTUS.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan digital news outlet.

The Washington Post said an unnamed White House official declined to say how Polis is not cooperating with the administration, but denied the move was in response to Polis and his team not releasing Peters from prison.

Sure, Jan. 

Colorado is already fighting back 

According to Politico,  the U.S. Senate adjourned for the holidays this past week without passing a government funding package that would prevent a partial government shutdown starting January 30. 

One big part of the holdup are Democratic Colorado Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, who said they would hold up the spending package because of the plan to dismantle NCAR.  

Trump appears to be in a weaker position politically than he was earlier this year. Stay tuned at this bat channel to see whether the plan to end NCAR really happens.

We should all hope not. 

Greenland Atmospheric River Temporarily Slowed The Island's Inexorable Ice Cap Meltdown

A massive atmospheric river hit Greenland in March, 2022
and dumped so much snow that it temporarily  halted
the dangerous melting of its massive ice cap. 

As land-based glaciers melt and wilt under pressure from climate change, sea levels keep rising as a result . Long term, it's easily one of the biggest threats to us humans as the world warms. 

That's one of the reasons why climate scientists are obsessed with Greenland. There's a lot of ice up there, and the more it melts, the more the sea levels rise. 

 If all of Greenland's ice mass melts, which I admit won't happen anytime soon, global sea levels would rise by an average of 23 feet. 

Which would be absolutely devastating. Even a couple feet of rising seas would be a zillion dollar, life threatening, world-changing  mess. So you see why Greenland is important.

It's mostly bad news as big bits and pieces of Greenland's ice melts every year in the stew of a climate change summer  Because they are human, scientists do look for, ore at least vaguely celebrate, any piece of good news. 

They found one of those happy pieces of news in a massive atmospheric river that hit Greenland in 2022. 

I've told you about atmospheric rivers in past posts.  Those are those ribbons of high moisture air that come off oceans, hit land and dump often incredible amounts of rain or snow over a relatively narrow area.

In one sense, they're good, as they supply a lot of the needed moisture that the West Coast of the U.S. and other place need. But they're very often bad, causing intense flooding. 

The atmospheric river that scientist seized upon from 2022 turned out to be a good thing. 

Per Gizmodo:

"A research pair has investigated the recent impact of an intense atmospheric river - a channel of water vapor that brings moisture and heat from warmer oceans to colder regions - on Greenland's ice sheet. 

Unexpectedly, they found that this phenomenon deposit 16 billion tons of snow on Greenland, thought to temporarily slow its ice melt. As detailed in a study published March 3 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, atmospheric rivers might have a more positive impact than researchers had theorized.."

A positive impact, sure. But certainly not a cure-all.

The uber-snowy atmospheric rive that struck Greenland in March, 2022 slowed the island's yearly ice melt but didn't stop it. 

The Greenland ice sheet ultimately shrunk in 2022, just as it did for the previous 26 years and just as it did for the subsequent two.

But at least for now, atmospheric rivers might not always be the ice destruction events in Greenland scientists feared.  

The March, 2022 event suggests that Greenlandic atmospheric rivers could be snowy. Very, very snow. That buys just a bit of time in the Greenland ice melt derby. After all, the amount of snow that hit Greenland in that 2022 event boggles the mind. 

THE STORM

That same atmospheric river pummeled Svalbard, an island in the Arctic north of Norway with intense , highly unseasonable rain. 

Researchers who took samples and ice core readings after that epic atmospheric river found some surprising results in Greenland, as Gizmodo tells us:

"The ice core section revealed that the atmospheric river had brought 16 billion tons of snow to Greenland, single-handedly offsetting the ice sheet's yearly loss by 8 percent in just three days." An additional 4.5 billon tons of snow fell over the next few days as the atmospheric river slowly waned. 

Spring, 2022 in Greenland was otherwise unusually warm, so the atmospheric river prevented a LOT of potential ice melt. 

There's no guarantee, of course, that atmospheric rivers will bring welcome snow blitzes to Greenland. As the world continued to warm, a future March 22 mega snow could end up being a mega-rain.

Inches and inches and feet of rain on the Greenland ice cap would really set off a wave of melting that would dwarf any of the big melts we've seen up there in recent summers.