The Trump Regime and Meteorological Malpractice

  "The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted,  one that is now being trampled is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.  

Has it finally comes to pass that people who ordinarily would not read are doin so now?  What they have to read is personal in their view.   Goings on in government affect them and their safety.  Their children's health and their kids' future lives depend on it--on what Mommy and Daddy are doing about the current assault on them and their futures.  

The New Yorker is dishing out the information as in the quote here:

With few exceptions both Republicans and Democrats have supported independent science understanding that the nation benefits from research that promotes health innovation and economic growth.  But since Trump returned to office his administration has fired or muzzled government scientists with   disfavored views on nutrition and climate change, canceled funding for long-running surveys on food and security and global health, dismissed independent committees focused on air pollution, health care disparities, and hospital infections, and pulled support for research into vaccines."  [emphases mine]        

    Then in a book review of  Joe Sacco's  latest book, The Once and Future Riot  the reviewer,  Robert Rubsam, makes such fact-finding a key theme, demonstrating the instability of a political system grounded in untruth—and investigating how populist leaders can wield that for their own ends.

The current President of the United States does everything for his own ends.  Am I right?  Trump has told us time and again that his only concern, his only priority, is Donald J. Trump and what he can grab for himself.  

Democracy dies not in darkness, but in broad daylight. 

Then we have the news that "On Tuesday afternoon, the risk of wildfire in northeastern Colorado had risen high enough that Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility company, announced that it would shut down power in much of the area the following day."

 Trump hs closed, shut down, the "Boulder, Colorado–based National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR." Frightening?  Scares me.

But wait, there's more.   The article goes on to say that the "Trump administration planned to 'dismantle' the center."

The following deserves to be printed verbatim.  

'Like many of the institutions and agencies targeted by the Trump administration this year—USAID, the Forest Service, the National Institutes of Health—NCAR is vulnerable in part because so few Americans know what it does, if they’ve heard of it at all. Established in 1960 to advance the field of meteorology, which had flourished during World War II but languished in peacetime, the center was designed to coordinate research on “the problems of the atmosphere” and provide the large-scale computing facilities necessary for that work. It now employs more than 800 researchers and makes its facilities available to thousands more each year.

Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and the chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, called NCAR “quite literally our global mothership.” Daniel Swain, a UC Agriculture and Natural Resources climate scientist known for his commentary on extreme-weather events, hosted a “rapid response” livestream yesterday morning. “Most academics in the weather and climate world,” he said, “have in some way passed through or connected with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.” Swain, himself a research partner at NCAR, spoke to his audience from Boulder, warning that the area’s planned power shutoff could bring his report to an abrupt end. He described the administration’s plans for NCAR as “a genuinely shocking self-inflicted wound.”'