MADNESS: KILLERS OF CLIMATE SCIENCE

President Trump and Secretary of Commerce Lutnick are shutting down the Princeton University-NOAA Cooperative Institute which removes half of the scientists at the world’s most renowned climate modeling laboratory, the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton. Why?

President Trump is following his Project 2025 playbook and is trying to crush NOAA climate and apparently Princeton as well. Denying climate and crippling the most advanced climate projections globally will cost lives, increase property damage, economic loss and take America back to the 1960’s and 70’s level of technological skill. Following Trump’s current directions the country will see the polluted water, gritty air, depleted fish stocks, degraded weather forecasts, and a higher number of fatalities attributable to weather events.

Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, former CEO and Chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, must know the vital nature of climate science and information. His own policy, Cantor Fitzgerald’s “Sustainability Due Diligence Policy” has a section on “Climate Change” that includes the reality succinctly stated:

  “Climate change is the defining issue of our time. Scientific evidence indicates that if left unchecked, climate change with be disastrous and life threatening.”

And perhaps most financially relevant, “Climate change also presents a challenge to our investments.” (Cantor Fitzgerald Sustainability Due Diligence Policy, 03/2024, p. 6, Section 2.5.1, https://cantorfitzgerald.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/CFAME-Sustainability-Due-Diligence-Policy_May23.pdf. As any company performs due diligence in such matters, the information they are basing their work on comes from NOAA, as have the roots of every climate model in the world. NOAA’s data and model outputs have been the source for all startups and other nations to train their own models and products. And while some climate carpetbaggers may arrive to be selling snake oil, NOAA’s scientific integrity has been a resource for validating product claims.

NOAA scientists created the world’s first functional climate model decades ago at this Princeton Lab, and there today NOAA has the world’s best performing climate model. This model distills the science and shows the world that that human caused climate change is real and what the future will look like. I know this is true from NOAA and Princeton scientists, but I also know this is true because Exxon told me it is true. Their scientists, and those of other oil, coal, and automobile manufacturing companies came to the same conclusions and have for decades expressed these results in their own published scientific papers and internal documents. (Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections, Supran, Rahmstorf, and Oreskes. 13 Jan 2023, Science, Vol 379, Issue 6628, DOI: 10.1126/science.abk0063) But President Trump denies it.

Consider Trump’s playbook, Project 2025 and his current actions. During his campaign he denied knowledge of it, yet it is the playbook he is now executing. He and his acolytes claim that an overwhelming number of Americans, more than 77 million people, voted for this. But 75 million people voted against it, and more than 89 million eligible voters did not vote. Hardly, does he have a “powerful mandate” under his wing. But Project 2025 emotionally opines that NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.” (Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 664.) The writing lacks specificity or analysis, just stating plain and unguided outcomes. But in witnessing what dismantling is occurring in all federal agencies including NOAA, this blind slashing will surely reduce the effectiveness, quality, services, and integrity of the United States federal government. And to a President who chooses to not believe in climate change, the U.S. will lose its 80 years of post-WWII leadership on many fronts, including scientific excellence and the economic prosperity that it has enabled.

Trump habitually lies or denies evident truths to achieve his ambitions, sustain his power and enliven his base supporters. Public acceptance of climate denial is evidence of the failures of science literacy in America. But it also fuels Trump’s followers who feel over-regulated, that government is bloated, and that the sciences of health, medicine, environment, and climate invite regulatory disruptions to their lives and economy. For their immediate convenience it is easier to avoid the details of understanding the subject and cheer the opinions of the well-funded climate denial industry. The same tactics and arguments arose in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s against the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and other environmental laws but that didn’t stop President Richard Nixon from signing them. None of the industrial changes mandated by those laws crippled our economy. Instead, they delivered to the Nation further prosperity, a cleaner environment, and better health for the American people. The actions of the U.S. provided inspiration and influence for the rest of the world.

NOAA began in 1970 at the pen of Richard Nixon. The agency was created to house all ocean and atmospheric science and natural resource elements of the federal government. The primary mission areas were ocean resources, weather, and to explore the relationship between the ocean and the atmosphere. NOAA incorporated the former Weather Bureau and the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, becoming the National Weather Service and National Marine Fisheries Service, respectively. And other elements were added including the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research to focus on this air/sea interaction. The agency constructed ships to take ocean measurements and bring scientists directly to sea, aircraft to sample the physical and chemical aspects of the atmosphere, satellites to measure atmospheric movements from space, buoy systems to generate ocean time series of continuous measurements where ships could not linger. NOAA built gas sampling stations and global networks to measure the atmospheric composition, of gases, particulate matter, and aerosols, and temperature changes and gaseous distribution. The agency constructed models to distill the scientific conclusions and allow future projections which have been proven reliable.

As these decades of investment began to return greater certainty of understanding, the notion of today’s climate science was born. Prior to this effort, climate was more of a geographic cataloging of, for example, the rainfall in the Andes and to what altitude might bananas grow. But after a few decades of pursuing the ocean-atmosphere interaction with physical scientists, oceanographers, atmospheric chemists, geophysical dynamics modelers, hydrographers, and meteorologists, weather forecasts improved greatly, ocean conditions were understood not just in the terms of the fish species sought for capture but for the entire marine ecosystem, and the state of the Earth’s changing climate was detected, documented, modeled and forecasted. Those models, NOAA’s, academic’s, and Exxon’s all came into agreement on the data that NOAA was collecting, curating, stewarding, and freely disseminating. NOAA defined climate change. Originally, the term was “global warming” but the George W. Bush Administration in its disfavor of the science outcome forbade the continuation of that term and replaced it with “climate change” but that now is out of favor with the animus of a more dictatorial President. All the data is freely available, the United States is recognized as the world leader in the scientific, not political, understanding of climate science, and the data speaks for itself. The President’s pronouncement that it is not real will not remove undo the reality of a burning Los Angeles, deluges in Houston, Asheville, New York, and the very extremes that were predicted decades ago by all the climate scientists and modelers including those who were employed by today’s oil companies.

Over many years, NOAA’s scientific achievements have led to laws since 1978 creating and sustaining the work of the agency and recruiting others to assist. A National Climate Program was created with NOAA leading it. That program is required to perform “basic and applied research to improve the understanding of climate processes, natural and man induced, and the social, economic, and political implications of climate change.” (15 U.S.C. §2904(d)(2). The program shall include data collection, monitoring, and analysis and the means for dissemination of climate related data and information. The Congressional purpose stated was and is to assist the Nation and the world to understand and respond to the processes and origin of climate change. With such a legislative mandate, it is hard to suppress or extinguish such a mission though Trump and Lutnick are trying. The law is clear. It will not be the Trump Justice Department, but will Congress protect the American people?

NOAA’s climate data, assessments, and outlooks as required by law are used every day by farmers to determine their seasonal choice of crops based on the projected annual, semiannual, and seasonal weather outlooks. Since 2006, when NOAA perfected the implementation of a global network of autonomous ocean buoys called Argo, the futures trading market began to move beyond the initial precision of the El Nino forecasts enabled by the previous generation of buoys. The futures market has been richly enabled because of NOAA’s climate data. Trucking companies and shipping lines choose routes to economize on fuel and enhance safety based on NOAA data. Every insurance policy in the United States is based on a determination of risk to the property, based on NOAA climate data, models, and NOAA’s scientific assessments that are taken up by the company’s own climate scientists, many of whom trained at NOAA facilities themselves. Startup businesses are founded on the availability of NOAA climate information, in many cases offering a tailored forecast of flooding, ranges of extreme weather, and advice to communities and homeowners of how to prepare for what kind of hazards. As sea level rises, NOAA is the authority to define what is the current level of the sea, and how it is changing by daily measurements of the tidal range, storm surges, and any subduction of underlying land. NOAA climate information forecasts the permanent migration of marine ecosystems, informing coastal communities that today’s fishery will belong to someone else farther north as marine ecosystems are themselves climate refugees in a warming world, and will leave behind communities whose economies were based on yesterday’s fish stocks. The world is impacted by climate change and will continue to be so, and NOAA is the world leader in providing that information for risk, for planning, and for economic readiness of these foreseeable futures.

Attendant to the ambitions of Project 2025, shuttering the data and climate data delivery tools which NOAA has perfected, recall that the President eliminated the Biden Executive Order on Scientific Integrity on his first day in office. That Order protected government agency scientists from political interference in the conduct and reporting of scientific findings, such as climate conclusions, or hurricane forecasts. Recall Trump’s erroneous forecast in Hurricane Dorian and the subsequent hunt to fire anyone responsible for countering his error; that was applying his Schedule F. Or the appointment at the close of his first Administration of climate skeptics to positions intended to influence the National Climate Assessment, a report required of NOAA by law. Fortunately their own tactics took them down.

Fast forward to today. Trump has eliminated the protections of federal scientists from political interference by withdrawing a protective Executive Order. Trump has implemented Schedule F as “Career Policy” positions, and his list includes many responsible agency scientists who deliver the legally required information on climate. Will he fire all the truthful scientists who don’t believe his voodoo? As Trump denies and denounces climate science our fires will burn, droughts deepen, deluges exceed history, and your costs will go up. Where in our national character of truth, dignity, international scientific leadership, will that leave us? One day, after Trump, American may recover, but no greatness awaits the Nation under this man.

Climate change is real and humans are causing it. President Trump denies it. I was at NOAA for 41 years. When I retired I was in charge of NOAA Research which included the climate science portfolio, plus weather, ocean, and coastal research. President Trump fired me from the acting Chief Scientist position for promoting scientific integrity in the face of his political interference during Hurricane Dorian (or, “Sharpiegate”). Every four years, America selects and elects policy; America does not elect science. It stands on its own merit.