Trump Dismantles Climate-Industrial Complex

The Trump administration took a major whack at the climate-industrial complex this week. It’s a fantastic move. But another event this week spotlights the need to do more.

White House Office of Management and Budget Chief Russ Vought announced this week that the Trump administration would “be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.” Vought added: “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country. A comprehensive review is underway and any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”

The announcement put climate hoaxers into orbit.

In “Trump officials to dismantle ‘global mothership’ of climate forecasting,” the Washington Post reported: “The announcement drew outrage and concern from scientists and local lawmakers, who said it could imperil the country’s weather and climate forecasting, and appeared to take officials and employees by surprise.”

“If true, public safety is at risk and science is being attacked,” Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said. “Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science. NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families,” he added.

NCAR “is quite literally our global mothership,” said the Nature Conservancy’s chief scientist. “Dismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet,” she added.

Beam’em up, Scotty.

While NCAR does valuable research related to weather, its climate-related work is awful. In 1970, NCAR researchers predicted that a new ice age would set in during the first third of the 21^st century – i.e., right about now.

In 1979, NCAR climate legend Stephen Schneider predicted that global warming could cause the entire East Coast to be flooded within decades – i.e., right about now.

In 2009, NCAR all-star researcher Kevin Trenberth was caught in the Climategate e-mail scandal admitting to fellow climate hoaxers: “The fact is that we cannot account for the lack of warmth at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

The good news is that the weather work NCAR does will continue. But NCAR’s always wrong, if not ridiculous, climate hoax work will be cut.

But as with other Trump administration efforts to terminate the climate hoax, fixing NCAR is not enough. Earlier this week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued its annual “Arctic Report Card,” in which it claimed (as usual) that the Arctic is heating up faster than the rest of the planet. The climate hoax-friendly media outlet, The Guardian, headlined the story as “Arctic endured year of record heat as climate scientists warn of ‘winter being redefined.”

The science problem with NOAA’s report card is that it lacks any historical perspective. We don’t have very good data on the Arctic. The Soviet Union established the first temperature station near the North Pole in 1937. But summer ice melt washed it away. The U.S. didn’t make it to the Arctic until 1952 – in a submarine. The satellite record of the Arctic didn’t begin until 1979, which was the very end of the mid-20^th century cooling period and so Arctic ice was at a peak.

It started warming in the 1980s – no one knows why for sure – and Arctic sea ice extent began to shrink. Arctic sea ice extent stopped shrinking in the mid-2000s (despite huge emissions growth) and has never been close to ice-free in the summer as Al Gore predicted it would be by 2014.

Yet NOAA is still sounding the climate alarm. The White House needs to get on top of NOAA and give it the NCAR treatment: Weather, yes. Climate, no.

Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.