With everything going on, it is worth noting that the war on science continues. Despite clear indications from Congress that they intend to retain funding levels for NOAA, the Trump administration appears to plan to simply not spend money Congress allocated so that they can starve out parts of NOAA. This as weather researchers try […]| The Grumpy Geophysicist
Electoral-Vote.com took a moment to compare headlines from this past week with a 2003 checklist of indications of a fascist state…here is their scorecard: Powerful and Continuing Nationalism:…| The Grumpy Geophysicist
There were signs that the federal government wasn’t going to leave academic science entirely, but then there is increasing evidence that science would be sidelined. There was movement in the …| The Grumpy Geophysicist
By now you probably have seen one or more articles noting that a failure that led to lives being lost might well include the early retirement of the weather service officer who worked on integration with local authorities in the event of an emergency. That the two relevant NWS offices responsible for the area hardest […]| The Grumpy Geophysicist
Let’s not bury the lede. If you want to decrease the risk from events like this, you should oppose the dismemberment of the research arm of NOAA as currently proposed in the 2026 budget. Later on GG will explain… Pictures from Texas remind those of us in Boulder of our 1000-year rainstorm nearly 12 years […]| The Grumpy Geophysicist
Just a quick note. Off in Paul Krugman’s Substack is a discussion with economist Jonathan Gruber about health care. Interestingly, about 2/3s of the way through, the discussion takes an interesting turn to lament the cutting of science programs. Gruber, in part hawking his book, notes that public science was, back in 1967, 2% of […]| The Grumpy Geophysicist
So over the past few months–yes, less than 1/8th of Trump’s second term–we’ve seen and experienced one of the most pervasive assaults on science in the US ever. And one of the things that makes it so head-spinning is that it seems utterly arbitrary. Is there some guiding principle behind all this? The place to […]| The Grumpy Geophysicist
Kind of an interesting conjunction of news in the science press: Science is covering yet another declaration (this from employees at the EPA) accusing the administration of undermining the agencies…| The Grumpy Geophysicist
“There’s a feeling in the air that somebody’s out to get scientists.” How carefully do you read the novel-length “terms and conditions” for some software purchase? Scroll to…| The Grumpy Geophysicist
Some of us have seen this coming down the pike, and anybody who was aware of the dishonesty of the (failed) HONEST act of 2017 (and the earlier attempts to use something like it as a cudgel against…| The Grumpy Geophysicist
Update: Well, GG wasn’t the only one disappointed with the McNutt speech; Ars Technica was more brutal (mainly because the elephant in the room was ignored). So Marcia McNutt, the National Ac…| The Grumpy Geophysicist
So we in the scientific community have been witnessing with dismay the disassembly of federally supported scientific research along with the attempts by the administration to cow universities to do…| The Grumpy Geophysicist
So we are looking pretty certainly at a brave new world of greatly reduced U.S. federal science funding. Will this result in high-grading the scientists who remain, meaning that the really good sci…| The Grumpy Geophysicist
2 June update: The NSF budget has been revealed in all its…glory? The overall cut from ~$9B to $3.9B is gruesome. Overall proposal success rate is estimated to drop to 7%. Postdoctoral fellow…| The Grumpy Geophysicist
Recently Michael Kratsios, the President’s science advisor (though lacking a science background) and head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), gave a speech and …| The Grumpy Geophysicist
Who picks the science that the government funds? With the National Science Foundation, there were programs that Congress mandated and there were kind of bread and butter programs that were funding …| The Grumpy Geophysicist
Well, the purge of the datasets has now begun. Ars Technica reports that NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) will no longer track the cost of weather disasters. This m…| The Grumpy Geophysicist