Muzzling our meterologists
If you don’t like the temperature, fire your meteorologist? This is the hostile attitude of the Trump administration against climate science. In December, the administration announced the breaking up and silencing of the National Center of Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. This is our flagship institution for monitoring, understanding and modeling weather and climate. NCAR research is vital for meteorologists, the military, farmers, airlines, health care providers … the list goes on and on.
Already, under Trump’s fury, the topic of “climate change” is disappearing from public discourse, a banished term as in George Orwell’s “Newspeak” in his novel “1984.”
I was proud to live in a country that fostered the best climate science in the world to help us keep our planet habitable and affordable for future generations. We had been on a path to understand and scale back the worst effects of climate change on our economy, health and national security. Now we are scattering our precious communities and grandchildren into the ideological maelstrom.
This insanity is being funded and perpetrated by the fossil fuel industry, which has purchased the allegiance of the Trump administration and most members of Congress. This takeover by fossil fuel interests also is rampant in our Republican state government. We must ban corporate money from politics and vote out those who muzzle the truth.