Climate Scientist Fired From West Point Because He Taught Climate Science

A professor at West Point was fired for teaching that
the world's current climate change is mostly caused by
humans, in contrast to Donald Trump's rants.
The fired professor is suing

Donald Trump's war on climate science extends all the way to West Point, making America's armed forces less prepared to deal with the warming world. 

The Guardian brings us the latest example:

"The only climate scientist teaching at West Point, the U.S. Army's military academy, was fired after he resisted an order to stop teaching about the human causes of the climate emergency, a lawsuit claims.

Dr. Adam Kalkstein a civilian professor of geography at the New York institution, was terminated after the spring semester this year, six months after a testy meeting with Brig. Gen. Shane Reeves, then dean of West Point's academic board, the court filing said."

Kalkstein had taught at West Point for 17 years. He said removing material out the human causes of climate change are immoral and potentially illegal.  "We're only telling cadets part of the story. Were lying to them, deceiving them. It would be like trying to teach the law without being able to even mention the Constitution," he said, reported Stars and Stripes.

The lawsuit calls for a jury trial and to block West Point from imposing "baseless" restrictions on academic freedom. It also demands that Kalkstein be reinstated to his job, and pay him monetary damages. 

Kalkstein's lawyer said his client is a conservative and does not have an ideological perspective. In other words, he's not an anti-Trump activist. 

As Stars and Stripes explains it, this all started in May, 2025, when Kalkstein learned his tenured position would be terminated as part of a staff reduction.  He was eventually allowed to remain at West Point as a "term employee" being paid via a $750,000 external grant.  He did have to forfeit a large severance package. 

In September, 2025 when the directive came down to not mention the human causes of climate change. Kalkstein raised concerns about lying to cadets about the issue.  

That culminated in a November, 2025 meeting with Reeves at West Point. Kalkstein brought up concerns about lying to cadets about the human causes of climate change.  Reeves responded by saying that Trump, as commander in chief, sets the agenda for West Point.  Reeves then stormed out of the meeting. 

Stars and Stripes continues:

"At the end of the spring semester, Kalksein  found out his contract would not be renewed. The justification was 'poor character and temperament' with the November meeting cited as evidence."

Which is rich since Reeves is the one who had a tantrum and stormed out of the meeting. 

Trump loves to live in a fictitious world. Fine for him, I guess, but he insists we all live in his fictitious world, much to our peril. 

Kalkstein isn't the only person at West Point victimized by Trump's fantasies. 

 Stars and Stripes reports:

"Kalkstein's is the second lawsuit filed by a civilian teaching at West Point since the start of Trumps second term as president. Tim Bakkan, a law professor, filed a lawsuit in September, 2025 over the banning of some books and courses, which he said violated the First Amendment. That case is ongoing in the courts."

West Point  officials wouldn't comment, citing pending litigation. The White House also has no responded to requests for comments. 

Of course, the firings at West Point are only two examples of people losing their jobs for the sin of talking about plain facts.

Trump and his minions really don't care if our military is ready for whatever might come along. They're more interested in their own talking points and egos than anything else.  

United States MAGA Meltdown Over Canadian Wildfire Smoke Is A National Embarrassment

Thick smoke in Chicago last week.
MAGA has been embarrassingly 
whining about the smoke without
offering any real help or 
solutions to the problem. 

Just stop already. 

MAGA is going nuts over the wildfire smoke billowing into theUnited States from Canada, and it has long since become embarrassing. 

Somehow, MAGA thinks Canada can wave a magic wand to stop the fires, or, they're sending the smoke over the border as some sort of deliberate provocation. 

Sigh.

MAGA has spent the past week falling over each attacking Canada for the fires, as if they aren't battling the blazes with everything they have and praying for soaking, widespread rains. 

We have so many, sad disgusting examples. Let's go through a bunch of them, just to wallow in the stupidity. : 

Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio said he is introducing legislation that would require an investigation as to whether the Canadian smoke had harmed U.S. air quality and to sanctions those responsible. Moreno ought to be careful, given the harm the United States has caused Canada.

Moreno's legislation gets worse.

As Daily Beast reports, "The bill reportedly goes so far as to threaten to revoke the visas of those deemed responsible for the 'atrocity.' The legislation also 'expresses a sense' that the Canadian ambassador should be declared persona non grata until the smoke no longer affects the U.S." 

Moreno's legislation would ban U.S. government contracts with Canada and Export-Import Bank assistance and authorize the president to most import restrictions.  

Katie Miller, the wife of the odious White House aide Stephen Miller, posted the wild idea that annexing Canada would have spared the U.S. of the wildfire smoke. "This is why Canada should be the 51st state," she wrote. 

Rep. Lisa McClain, Michigan, had this temper tantrum on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter: "Michiganders shouldn't have to breathe negligence....."YEAR AFTER YEAR the smoke crossed the border while Canada does nothing. Stop exporting your smoke into our skies. Enough is enough!"

Does she expect Canada to erect a wall to block the smoke?

Also on X, Rep. Nick Langworthy, R-NY, whined, "This is no longer a one-time emergency - it's becoming an annual public health crisis. This is unacceptable."

It's not just MAGA Republicans. I found a Democrat who entered the fray. Michigan State Rep. Alabas Farhat  posted on Threads:

"For four straight years, Canada has failed to get these fires under control, and Michigan continues to pay the price." 

He referred the fires as "Canada forest management failures." He also said if Canada "refuses" to stop the fires (as if!) he said "There should be consequences."

This motive for all this whining? Almost all of it is in service to the Orange Lump of a president. We remember all the anti-Canada blather Trump has belched, the demands to make Canada the 51st state. And, after a couple days of all this, on Friday, all this stupidly and predictable whining culminated with Donald Trump saying he would add to the tariffs he's already imposed on Canada.

The Orange Lump said Canada "has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal."  I guess Canada was supposed to rake its forests, just as he insisted California should have done. 

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had a devastatingly low key reaction to the MAGA tantrums: "Climate change is everyone's responsibility, truly everyone's including the United States."

ABOUT THAT CLIMATE CHANGE

There have always been occasional years with Canadian or western United States fires that belch smoke into the United States. It used to be infrequent. 

On May 19, 1790 - way back when - was labeled the "Famous Dark Day" in New England, according to the Vermont Weather Book.  Candles were needed to read, and the air had an eerie, brassy hue. That was probably smoke from the western United States or maybe the northern Great Lakes region.

On September 6, 1881, it was the legendary, "Yellow Day,"  Everything took on a yellow hue, and artificial light was needed to read documents and books during the day. Basically the same thing happened in September, 1908, and September 1950.

So we used to have smoky days, but since those days were a rarity, they became legend. 

Now however, smoke attacks are no longer a rarity, but a regular occurrence. So what changed?

Canada has roughly 1.4 million square miles of forest. Most of it is boreal forest, a broad area representing 30 percent of the global forest area in northern areas of Canada, Russia and Alaska. 

Most of the forests are remote, and impossible to manage like forests in more populated areas in the continental United States.

Fires have gotten worse and widespread in recent years for reasons that mostly have to do with climate change. The snow in the spring melts sooner than it once did, leaving more time for the landscape two dry out than it once did Parts of Canada are warming at twice the rate of the global average, creating heat waves that further dry things out. 

The summer heat also destabilizes the air, creating thunderstorms with relatively little rain but plenty of lightning strikes that set off fires.  Invasive bark beetles kills swaths of foresters, leaving behind tinder dry dead trees. 

So, contrary to MAGA, Canada isn't trying to torture Americans by sending choking wildfire smoke into the United States. They are in large part a victim of climate change. And historically, the United States has always been the #1 or #2 greenhouse gas emitters in the world. 

In the end, climate change has us breathing smoke that makes us sick, and will end up killing some of us. 

MAGA has been yelling outrageous things about the wildfire smoke. But just hint to them climate change might have had something to do with it, the screaming just becomes that much louder. 

THE FIRES

On Saturday, 949 fires were burning across Canada, according to the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System.  The intense fires in Ontario were quieter, thanks to some rain.

But those weren't the only fires burning in North America.  As of Saturday, there were 73 large fires burning across the United States, including 17 new large incidents, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Most of these were in the West and in northern Minnesota. There were also a multitude of smaller fires burning around the nation. 

Fires are also burning in the boreal forests of Siberia. In recent days, a fire in Norway spread from a townhouse and into a forest, where it continued on to destroy about 100 homes. It was the largest such fire in Norway's history. 

TRAGEDY, HELP AND HONOR

It's not as if Canada is just gleefully sending smoke to the U.S.  Smoke has choked much of southern Canada, including large cities like Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. 

The Canadian fires have especially hit the First Nations communities in Ontario. Thousands were evacuated. An unknown number of houses have burned, but the number of destroyed buildings is easily in the hundreds. 

Normally, and in the past, the United States and Canada would help each other with emergencies. Canada is still doing that. 

Sometimes, firefighters give their lives to the effort. About a week ago, Nicholas Dale, 56 of Sooke, British Columbia died in a helicopter crash while responding to a wildfire in not too far north of Telluride. 

Dale's death make the vitriol aimed at Canada over the smoky atmosphere especially galling. 

In a demonstration of how much more decent most Americans are, compared to the noxious MAGA crowd, Wyoming Public Radio described this scene as the sad process of returning Dale's body to Canada began. :

"On Monday morning, a line of firetrucks, ambulances and other emergency response vehicles flashing their lights stretched for nearly a mile as the convoy passed through the little towns and small cities between Gunnison and Grand Junction. 

In Montrose, hundreds somberly lined U.S. Highway 509 holding American flags to honor Dale."

STUPIDITY WORSENS

Meanwhile, he whining from MAGA kept getting louder and even more bizarre gets even worse in some circles  

Right Wing Watch posted on X (formerly Twitter) posted this gem of a clip from MAGA activist Eric Metaxas: 

"Who's telling me how to live my life?  I'm an adult man in a free country, and you're telling me, 'limit your outdoor activity.'' he said, "How dare they say that. Who has the right to tell me or you or anyone anything? It's a free country. I can do whatever I want."

Never mind this was just an advisory, kind of like telling people to drive carefully in a winter storm. But the guy isn't very bright. The comments section was glorious

"He should definitely go outside ad jog for HOURS!

"Fine, Eric. Please go outside and put your mouth over a diesel bus exhaust. It will benefit all of us."

"Eric doesn't understand the difference between a suggestion and an order Poor guy."

"Oh the humanity! This dude is the victim of receiving information! Will the abusive alerts never stop enslaving him?"

"Getting asthma to own the libs."

"Dear Eric - I forbid you from running out in front of traffic on the expressway."

Metaxas is a great example of the low, ignorant, tragicomic  MAGA mentality. They can do anything! They are all powerful!  While the rest of us roll our eyes and laugh at them. 

MAGA seems to think the abuse they've hurled at Canada is a flex, showing how powerful they are. Trump and his minions are actually demonstrating exactly how weak they are. Their pathetic insults and whining is a precise demonstration of how impotent MAGA really is. 

We should all remember that despite their bluster, the rest of us hold most of the power. We ought to use it. 

  

Trump Administration's Obnoxiousness With Greenland Is Tacit Acknowledgment Of Climate Change

The United States is again making dumb noises about
annexing Greenland, diplomacy and legality be
damned. While the Trump administration denies
climate change exists, this whole mess
is largely about climate change. 

Greenland is back in the news again, as the Trump Administration is ramping up its efforts to take control of the big Arctic ice heap.  It's a move that practically nobody else wants other that Donald Trump and his not-so-merry band of MAGA cultists. 

One irony is that Donald Trump denies the existence of climate change, yet that very real warming of the planet is a big part of what's behind all this. 

To back up here, Trump last week appointed Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry as his envoy to Greenland. Landry said he would travel to Greenland to convince people living there to become part of the United States. 

Good luck with that. 

Greenland is a self-governing Danish territory. Officials in Greenland, Denmark and the European Union unanimously condemned Trump effort to annex Greenland.  A big majority of Greenlanders want increased independence from Denmark, but they really, really don't want to become part of the U.S.

Somebody from MAGA always says the quiet part out loud, and the ever-reliable Fox host Brian Kilmeade gave us this:

"Greenland has been ignored by Denmark for decades. Now they're not, because we have shown interest. They have about 60,000 people there and we have a huge military base. Look, we are going to need their natural resources to mine them - you'll (Denmark) be able to get some of that. But in the meantime, we have to expand our base there and access to the waterways, because the Arctic is melting and we need access there. 

Russia and China is (sic) trying to dominate. Plus, what are we in, the era of the Viking? What is Denmark doing in our backyard?"

Phew! There's a lot to unpack there. Our "need" for natural resources, as if we could just go in and take them.  Sure, Donald Trump said we need Greenland for security, not minerals. But it's about the minerals as much as it is about security. Especially in the sense of  how much money the grifters associated with Trump can make from exploiting Greenland.  

Kilmeade seems to think it's horrible that puny little Greenland wants to control its own future and puny little Denmark should have the gaul to be in control of Denmark.

Greenland is in our backyard, since it's hooked on to North America. Trump is like the homeowner who sees a ball accidentally thrown into his yard by neighborhood kids. He's the type that would keep the ball instead of throwing it back over to the kids. 

CLIMATE CONNECTION

But since this is a climate and weather blog, there's one piece in Kilmeade's screed that I want to focus on. It's where he said "the Arctic is melting."

I thought all the MAGA types deny human-caused climate change. They say it's a hoax. So why is the Arctic melting? It's true that Greenland is pretty steadily losing some of its massive ice cap to a warming world. 

Maybe Kilmeade will sputter that the climate changes "naturally," but how do you explain such a massive melt that developed over decades, not centuries like most of Earth's past episodes of natural warming and cooling?

Ultimately Trump's one-sided crush on Greenland is about the climate change that he publicly denies exists. 

As Al Jazeera tells us:

"Climate change and a rapidly melting ice sheet are the main reasons the Arctic has become a geopolitical hotspot

The Arctic is heating at a rate four times faster than the global average, increasing its accessibility for maritime trade routes and resource exploration - including by non-arctic countries as well as those with an Arctic presence. 

China has deployed vessels capable of serving both military surveillance and research functions in the region. The purposes are to collect data and secure access to resources and shipping lanes, which are emerging as a result of melting ice."

In addition, Russia is deploying missile systems and weapons testing in the Arctic, and has grown its naval presence near the top of the world. Canada is planning to shore up its military and diplomatic presence in the Arctic because of those Chinese and Russian moves in and near Greenland. 

So the security risk is real, but as usual, Trump's bluster, lies and utter untrustworthiness is botching it. 

Russia and Chinese military and espionage geeks are undoubtedly loving all of this.

What probably would have made a lot more sense was to light a fire under the European Union over the Arctic security threats, then negotiate some sort of alliance involving Denmark, the U.S. and other European nations as a counterweight to Russian and Chinese threats in Greenland and elsewhere in the Arctic.  

But nope! Trump just has to be a clownish bully to appease his own fragile ego and the expense of the rest of the world. 

For years we've been told that a warming planet would make political, social and military conflicts more likely. It's too bad Trump is working os hard in aiding and abetting the "hoax' climate change to make all that happen sooner and more dangerously than most of us thought.   

U.S. Sat Out Major UN Climate Conference, But Lobbyists Swarmed It

The United States is AWOL from the UN climate
talks in Brazil, while fossil fuel lobbyists
are there big time. 

The United States embarrassingly sat out this year's 30th annual UN Climate Change Conference - known as COP30 -  which surprised nobody, given Donald Trump's horror at anyone who even thinks climate change is a thing.  

But that fact is to our detriment, since the United States had no say in the kinds of climate change fighting prescriptions that might emerge from the conference.

Beside the U.S., the only other nations not at COP30 are Afghanistan, Myanmar and San Marino, notes Carbon Brief. 

The absence of the United States is striking because the nation is also the world's largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases. 

Overall, a total of 56,000 people from 193 countries attended the conference, which is the second largest crowd at any of any past conference. 

Unsurprisingly, this year's largest delegation comes from Brazil, since that's the nation hosting the whole thing.  The next largest delegations, in order of size are China (again no surprise) and of all countries, Nigeria, Indonesia and Democratic Republic of Congo. 

The annual COP meetings have become this huge thing, attended by at least 50,000 in each of the past four years. Most rounds of this conference drew few than 20,000 annual, except the 2015 iteration in Copenhagen and the 2021 gathering in Paris. 

The Paris COP was the year the world decided to try and limit planetary warming to 1,5 degrees of the 20th century average.  

This year, the United States backed out of the international agreement to try and limit the warming to 1.5 degrees. 

Of course, we'll probably blow past the 1.5 degree goal  anyway, as emissions continue to rise. 

At last report, delegates at COP30 were still struggling to come up with an agreement to set a global path away from the use of fossil fuels. But a draft deal doesn't mention coal, oil and gas, which are almost the entire reason we have a climate change problem. 

Which might be related to this tidbit from The Guardian, which reports that more than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to COP30. That's more than every single country's delegation aside from the host Brazil. 

The group Kick Big Polluters Out says one in every 25 participants at this big meeting is a fossil fuel lobbyist. 

Within the next couple of days, we'll see how well all those fossil fuel lobbyists did. Stay tuned!  

Marjorie Taylor Greene's Hearing On "Weather Modification" Goes As You'd Expect

Marjorie Taylor Greene, ever the enthusiastic 
purveyor of conspiracy theories, held quite
a recent Congressional hearing on weather
modification. We give the play by play. 

While the madness of Trump and late night TV and First Amendment violations and other general stupidity was going on, our friend Marjorie Taylor "Jewish Space Lasers" Greene was hard at work. 

Her latest was leading a House hearing on weather modification, or more precisely, weird weather conspiracy theories.  

Greene is seeking a federal ban on geoengineering and weather modification. She's among those who appear to think like horrible disasters like Hurricane Helene were not regular events or climate change-driven calamities, but some insidious government plot.

Hence here hearing earlier this month.  She announced: 

"Today's advocates of geoengineering don't just want to address droughts or improve conditions for agriculture......They want to control the Earth's climate to address the fake climate change hoax to head off global warming. That of course, requires massive interventions."

Of course, pretty much every scientist will tell you climate change is not "fake" or a "hoax" and is the real problem behind many of the weird weather extremes the world has been experiencing. But to Greene's mind, we need to stop making sense, to take a page from an old Talking Heads album and concert movies.  

As ABC notes, there have been no efforts to modify the climate on a global scale, mostly because there's no technology to make that possible. 

Then we get into the "science" part of the hearing. And I use that term "science: more loosely than I ever have before. Greene gave us this dire warning:  

"One (intervention) is to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Yes, the same carbon dioxide that keeps plants alive and prevents mass starvation."

Of course the problem isn't that there's carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's just that humanity has pumped too much of it into the air.  The whole burning fossil fuel thing. There are no mad scientists out there bent on removing all the carbon dioxide from the air to kill us all. 

There's been some tentative efforts to research efforts that would remove some of the CO2 from the air, but that hasn't really been effective at all yet. 

"Another method they want to use it to block the rays of the sun from hitting the Earth. You heard that right. Yes, the same sun that makes all life possible on Earth."

Sigh, again, there are no mad scientist trying to block all sunlight and kill us all.  As always with these whackadoodle statements, if you dig deep enough you find the tiniest kernel of truth amid the word salad. 

The idea of using technologies to reflect a portion of sunlight back into space to lower temperatures around the world has been around for decades. But there has been almost no real-world experiments with this. 

The Biden White House in 2023 produced a paper on this idea, known as solar radiation modification, but it was a general research roadmap which has so far gone nowhere to speak of.

No Marjorie Taylor Green hearing would be complete without her and like minded minions bringing up chemtrails. Repeatedly. Sigh. 

Chemtrails are fictional sprays coming out of aircraft, dreamed up by conspiracy theorists.  There's plenty of those theories, including ideas that the government is trying to poison the populace or do mind control on everybody or some bizarre thing, 

What all these people think are chemtrails is just water vapor from the exhaust of jet engines.

You know all that steam you see coming out of car tailpipes on frigid winter mornings? It's basically the same thing coming out of planes. Except often that water freezes and forms white streaks in the sky. They're just high level clouds. 

But wispy clouds are boring. Coming up with wild stories about covert government operations spraying us all into oblivion is much more sexy. 

 Some of Greene's cohorts came up with some wild bits of "information" which were, well, dubious to put it extremely politely.  Rep. Brian Jack, R-GA claimed a release of dry ice into a 1947 hurricane steered the storm into Georgia. 

It's true that the government released dry ice into a 1947 hurricane as an experiment. It's also true the storm made a hard left turn and came ashore near Savannah, Georgia. But the reason it did so was not the dry ice. It was steering currents in the atmosphere that would have been there with or without the dry ice. 

Besides, that hurricane started its westward turn before planes dumped anything into the storm. 

Also, experiments in the era also showed that dumping dry ice, or the more modern silver iodide used in clouds seeding failed to change the strength of hurricanes. They're much too powerful to succumb to human intervention, at least so far. 

Another one, Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, said that Al Gore's estimation of when the polar ice cap was wrong, so therefore basically all climate science was wrong. 

In reality, there's an alleged quote by Gore from 2009 that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013, which of course has not happened. 

Gore did not actually say that, but he did at the time accidentally misrepresented data when he suggest some models gave a 75 percent chance the Arctic would be ice-free in the summertime by 2014 to 2019. That's not exactly what researchers said, as they generally weren't giving a timeline as to when that would happen.

But, apparently, if one person -  Gore - got his facts mixed up on one aspect of climate change, then the whole idea of climate change is apparently false.  

Melanie Stansbury, D-NM, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee that held the hearing, did come up with one gem that I would rate as absolutely factually true. 

She said: "There's a more insidious issue here, which I think we've already heard in some of the comments, which is using the platform of Congress to propel anti-science theories to platform climate denialism and to ultimately put our communities at risk by continuing to put out disinformation."

 

NOAA Cutbacks From DOGE And Trump Are Continuing To Degrade Weather Forecast Accuracy. More Balloon Launches Scrubbed

DOGE staff cuts at NOAA means more weather balloon
launches have been cut. Those weather balloons are
critical for forecasting all sorts of weather. Including
severe storms and tornadoes. As we head into
tornado season, forecast accuracy will decline,
making these storms even more dangerous. 

 Your weather forecasts might get even less accurate than I thought with all the cutbacks at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA. 

Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE has decimated staffing at NOAA, leading to tough decisions on how to manage weather forecasts, and more importantly, warning the public when dangerous weather looms. 

Up to 1,000 NOAA employees have been let go. 

The latest issues is that more National Weather Service offices are canceling weather balloon launches due to staff shortages.  

That will lead to less reliable weather forecasts, and quite likely unpleasant and deadly storm surprises starting in the near future. 

THE LATEST CUTS

Per the Associated Press:

"The normally twice-daily launches of weather balloons in about 100 locations provide information that forecasters and computer models use to figure out what the weather will be and how dangerous it can get, so cutting back is a mistake, said eight different scientists, meteorologists and former top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -  the weather service's parent agency."

Believe me, it's not just eight scientists. That's just the ones the AP quoted for their article. There's universal derision and frustration with the NOAA cutbacks.  It will cost lives.

Not that Trump and Elon Musk care. 

We previously reported cutbacks on weather balloon launches from Kotzebue, Alaska; Albany, New York and Gray, Maine. 

Now, we learn balloon launches will be eliminated at Omaha, Nebraska and Rapid City, South Dakota. Twice daily launches will be reduced to once daily at Aberdeen, South Dakota, Grand Junction, Colorado, Green Bay, Wisconsin, Gaylord, Michigan, North Platte, Nebraska and Riverton, Wyoming. 

On top of all the launch cancelations due to staffing shortages,  some balloon launches are not happening because of a helium shortage. Also, there's sometimes technical issues that prevent balloon launches.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Taken together, that leaves big holes and blank spots in the data that goes into comprehensive weather forecasts. 

Many of the newly ended ballon launches are in the northern United States, where the jet stream is most commonly positioned in the spring and early summer.  The jet stream controls weather systems, so you really want to examine that part of the atmosphere for signs of storms. 

That lack of weather balloons will hinder that effort. 

We are now at the beginning of the peak severe storm and tornado season in the United States. Those balloon launches offer critical insights into what is happening on the atmosphere, helping meteorologists predict when severe weather - including tornadoes - might hit and how bad they'll get. 

Since there will now be a big data hole from those canceled balloon launches in the middle of the nation, the eastern United States in particular might have poorer weather forecasts. That's because the weather generally flows west to east. 

"For those of us east of the Rocky Mountains, this is probably the worst time of year," said (University of Oklahoma environmental professor Renee)  McPherson,'  'It's the time of year that we have some of our largest tornado outbreaks, especially as we move into April and May."

"This frankly is just dangerous," McPherson told the AP.

We had an incredibly severe storm outbreak in mid-March that claimed 42 lives. However, lives were saved because the storm was anticipated well in advance. That gave people, including emergency managers, time to prepare. When tornadoes started touching down, warnings went out so that people could seek shelter. That surely saved lives. 

That's the state of affairs with most severe weather outbreaks. 

With the balloon launch cancelations, we'll still get a heads up from the National Weather Service about approaching dangerous weather. But accuracy levels on the location of the bad weather and its intensity could well wane.

Additionally, when severe storms and tornadoes actually develop, short staffed National Weather Service offices might miss the signs of an impending tornado, and thus not issue any warnings until its too late.

If a tornado is approaching,  you want everybody to know about it. The best way to get that word out is through a National Weather Service tornado warning. 

These balloon launch problems will also probably interfere with hurricane forecasts, and predictions for wildfire weather conditions. 

Less important but still worth noting is that your day to day forecasts for routine weather will likely degrade, too.  The joke is that meteorologists are always wrong, but that's not at all backed up by the facts. 

The forecast for today actually has about a 97 percent chance of being accurate. A forecast for three days from now is about 90 percent. A forecast for a week from now has a 70 percent accuracy rate.

These excellent figures will worsen as the Trump administration hacks away at NOAA staffing and resources.  

Trump, Musk and the other oligarchs now seizing control of the United States are protecting from severe weather by their wealth and staff. As opposed us rubes who live in the real world and deal with real things. 

But the oligarchs don't care about us. The DOGE cuts aren't really about saving taxpayer money. It's all about lining pockets of said oligarchs to make them more rich and powerful.  No proof here, but I suspect the government "savings" will never go into most of our hands. 

After all, the DOGE cuts are designed to finance tax cuts for the rich, as the Republican led Congress is set to do.

Follow the money indeed! 

 

Don't Say "Climate": Trump Administration Scrubbing Climate Information From Federal Websites,

Don't say climate change!  Trump administration scrubs
mention of it from everywhere, because if you don't 
see the words then it doesn't exist, apparently. 

 If you don't say "climate change" then it doesn't exist.  

That, apparently is the logic of our lovely Trump administration as federal websites across the board remove pretty much all references to climate change over the course of his first month in office. 

Trump's first term played fast and loose with lots of information including items related to climate change. 

But this time, it's a full throttled Orwellian vision in which "facts" are whatever the Trump administration wants them to be. Reality is besides the point.  

This post isn't even talking yet about anticipated firings at NOAA and NWS that will hobble the nation's weather forecasting and warning system. That' update is coming in a future post arriving pretty soon. I'm just talking in this post about the Trump administration's thought that if you don't ever think about climate change, then it will never be a problem. 

Or something like that. 

Among the harmful firings at the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA are staffers that worked on climate change related issues. Since climate change affects the severity, location and types of disasters the U.S. faces, you'd think you'd need these staffers,

You know, to anticipate where and how disasters might strike so the agency can more readily help victims of these calamities. 

But I guess not 

The sprawling federal Agriculture Department has been ordered to scrub references to climate change as well, as Politico reports. 

The directive "could affect information across dozens of programs including climate-smart agriculture initiatives, USDA climate has, and Forest Service information regarding wildfires the frequency and severity of which scientists have linked to hotter, drier conditions fueled by climate change."

For now, some climate related material is still available from the Agriculture Department. USDA Climate Hubs, for example, was still up as of Wednesday (FEB5

NASA's Global Climate Change website is about to transition away, it it hasn't already.    It's been a handy source of climate information, including a dashboard on the home page that gives you the current amount of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere and their trends, global temperature and its trend and what direction Arctic sea ice is headed. Spoiler: Down.

There's now suddenly a disclaimer on the NASA Global Climate Change website that says "NASA's Global Climate Change website is going to look a little different in the coming months because we're headed to a new home, a more integrated portal on science.nasa.gov. Keep your eyes on our new space as we transition."

Yeah, love the attempt at the PR language (eye roll).  I'm not going to make a definitive conclusion on what the Trump administration is going to do with this site, but I bet it's not good. 

Climate information is disappearing from a lot of federal government websites, not just NASA. As Inside Climate News reports:

"The Trump administration is also removing climate information and documents from the U.S. State Department website, which (several days ago) had a climate section filled with documents related to U.S. climate policies aimed at meting the terms of the 2014 Paris climate pact, as well as materials outlining reaching plans to cut emissions of greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide, including methane.

But searching the current State Department website for the term 'global warming' just now leads to a long list of non-functioning links, with the Biden-era climate materials relegated to archives that have to be searched for separately."

 Even experienced scientists are now beginning to have trouble finding climate info on government websites. As Inside Climate News reports:

"Some of the changes may already be making it harder for U.S. climate scientists to collaborate internationally. 

David Ho, a University of Hawaii at Manoa climate researcher, said last week he found an error message when he tried to look for reports related to his work on ocean carbon cycles on the White House Office of Science and Technology website."

There are efforts to preserve web material that already exists before it is completely scrubbed. There's End of Term Web Archive, which is a collaboration of nonprofit groups, universities and two federal agencies to preserve scientific data. 

Other organizations have been combing government websites, preserving science data before it can be scrubbed by the Trump administration. 

I worry it's a matter of time that we won't be able to see basic climate data like the monthly reports NOAA"s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) regularly releases.

Or even just the huge waves of routine daily data all the National Weather Service offices release. After all, some rogue scientist could use and compile that data to find temperature trends (which is part of what the NCEI does now.

Guy Walton, the dude from Guy on Climate agrees, as this lack of information hurts everyone, from citizen scientists like me to experts like Walton. 

"....if the NCEI surface temperature records site gets taken down, I can't do my research. Only a few months ago, ,I was thinking that after the election of Kamala Harris, the NCEI record site might be improved with some of my input. Now I will feel fortunate if it and other tools for research used by many other scientists are not touched. We will see." 

Any truthful information is suspect in the Trump administration. You probably don't even have to use "banned"words or phrases like climate change or global warming. 

Merely mentioning a record hot day, month or season might well get you in trouble 

Even collaboration of any kind is out. As CBC reported, any cooperation between Canadian scientists or Environment Canada and NOAA are pretty much verboten. 

NOAA scientists now just submit for review if any discussions with Canadians include climate, energy, offshore wind, ocean mapping and exploration, competitive seafood, aquaculture, ocean plastics, the World Meteorological Organization, Arctic security and Arctic energy, notes CBC. 

A side effect of all this would be a brain drain from the United States to Canada and European countries, perhaps Asia too.

Most scientists want to seek the truth of the world around them. If that becomes impossible to do in the United States, then do it elsewhere, right?

The Trump administration's scrubbing away of any references to climate change won't just hurt Americans subject to the direct disasters and dangers created by global warming. Our economy, our innovation, our safety, our own wallets are all at risk. 

All because the merry band of oligarchs want to make a few more trillion dollars. 

 

Dude Picked To Run Commerce Department Will Probably Wreck The National Weather Service

Howard Lutnick is set to take over the Commerce 
Department under Trump.  Commerce controls NOAA
and the National Weather Service, and this all
bodes poorly for climate change research, and
timely weather emergency warnings. 

Last week we received word, that Donald Trump wants this guy named Howard Lutnick to be his commerce secretary.  

The U.S. Commerce Secretary's main role is to promote U.S. business, trade and innovation. 

Trump, as you probably heard on the news Wednesday, wants to impose these big tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China.  Lutnick is a big cheerleader for tariffs, so his pick is no big surprise.

Never mind that most economists tell us that tariffs like those Trump and Lutnick so love would tank the economy and make the inflation we saw under the early parts of the Biden administration seem like a walk in the park. 

OK, I can hear you telling me, fine, but this is supposed to be a weather and climate blog. Why the hell are you blathering on about tariffs?

Fair enough, but I'm finally getting to the point now. 

Commerce is a sprawling agency, overseeing a lot of other agencies. Among Lutnick's management duties is NOAA, in which th National Weather Service is a big part. 

Given Lutnick's loyalty and general agreement and subservience to Trump on just about everything, this is bad.  Since he's such a Trump loyalist, he'll likely follow through and wreck the National Weather Service too. 

Trump's campaign statements that he doesn't know much about Project 2025, the blueprint for "governance" that his minions put out, is ominious.

Per NPR: 

"Project 2025 - a planning document drafted by Trump allies - calls for dismantling the parent agency of the weather service, NOAA, and either eliminating or privatizing its functions or turning them over to the states. 

While Trump has sought to deny a connection, there is plenty of overlap between Project 2025 and his agenda."

This would dwarf the mischief that Trump and his then commerce secretary Wilbur Ross conducted during Trump's first term.

This goes back to the famous "Sharpie" incident in which Trump falsely said Hurricane Dorian threatened Alabama.  That's when Trump showed a weather map altered with a Sharpie that purported to show the hurricane was headed toward Alabama.

National Weather Service meteorologists in Alabama ran afoul of Trump by truthfully saying that the hurricane was no threat to Alabama. 

Ross threatened to fire meteorologists who contradicted Trump.

That incident was small potatoes compared to what's coming. 

Project 2025 calls for dismantling NOAA, I'm thinking mostly because scientists there study climate change, and Trump is trying to gaslight the world by vainly trying to convince everyone that said climate change doesn't exist.

This Project 2025 also would get rid of the National Weather Service, likely by privatizing it.  The results, at least from what I can tell, would be far less accurate forecasts, no coordinated warning system for severe weather, and worse, perhaps putting weather forecasts behind a paywall, so that only people who can afford it can get, say tornado or flash flood warnings.

All you rubes who can't afford a paywall like this are on your own. If you get killed by a tornado or a hurricane, it's your fault for not being rich, apparently.  

So, we knew Trump's picks for his cabinet would be bad for the battle against climate change, and against science in general. How that will happen is now coming into focus as we learn who's going to doing what in the Trump administration.