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
OK, there are plans to actually post some things about earth science, but for now, some flippancy. The country is being run by MAGA, and when America was great originally remains up in the air (195…| The Grumpy Geophysicist
8 posts published by cjonescu during May 2025| The Grumpy Geophysicist
As we’ve noted a few times before, the attempts by certain members of Congress and this administration to use transparency as a subterfuge to torpedo science they don’t like. Sometimes…| The Grumpy Geophysicist
GG was a bit disturbed in reading an Atlantic story describing how PLOS Biology and a few other journals were relaxing the rules on publishing papers that were scooped by rivals publishing the same…| The Grumpy Geophysicist
Although there has been a lot of focus on actions in the executive branch, a rather curious piece of legislation is working its way through Congress. HR 1430, called the HONEST act, might just be …| The Grumpy Geophysicist
A lot has been written about the results of the Reproducibility Project’s analysis of papers in psychology (for instance, here and here). While some of the response has been overwrought handw…| The Grumpy Geophysicist
2 posts published by cjonescu during August 2025| The Grumpy Geophysicist
GG has been doing a fair bit of hiking, including a 3 night backpack, in Wilderness areas here in Colorado. And as often happens, this provokes some thoughts. In this case, just how wild should Wilderness be? (As a reminder, capital W Wilderness is an official land use designation; little w wilderness is, well, whatever […]| 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
5 posts published by cjonescu during July 2025| 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
A recent article from eLife suggests that funding panel scores at NIH basically are unpredictive of future results: proposals that were very highly ranked produced publications with about the same …| The Grumpy Geophysicist
Back in 1992, Charles Wilkinson wrote a book, Crossing the Next Meridian, that argued that five dominant forces from the Americanization of the West were due to fade away: hard rock mining, overgrazing of public lands, logging of public lands, destruction of river and stream ecosystems, and prior appropriation of water. At the time, there […]| The Grumpy Geophysicist
We’re not taking maps like Google or Apple, we’re talking like surficial and bedrock. We are talking about geologic mapping. And it seems the Trump administration isn’t interested in doing any. GG hears that USGS scientists are forbidden from field work this year, and others in state agencies are facing an absence of funds to […]| 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
Last year, Nature ran an article documenting the retraction of over 10,000 scientific papers in 2023. The rate of retractions has risen from about one in every three thousand papers to one in every…| The Grumpy Geophysicist
The Economist, in their annual forward-looking edition, pointed out that science is stumbling. They note the intense competition for research dollars results in incredible amounts of time spent to …| The Grumpy Geophysicist
To be clear, we are talking scientific publication. And to save some of you time, there isn’t a lot new here, but the trends are looking to collide sooner rather than later. What does GG mean…| The Grumpy Geophysicist
A whole lot of attention has been focused on academic fraud in the wake of what seems to have been a spectacular case of data invention in a study of the effects of gay canvassers on the opinions o…| The Grumpy Geophysicist
6 posts published by cjonescu during June 2025| 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
Much of one chapter of GG’s book, The Mountains that Remade America, is devoted to the story of Mineral King and its eventual inclusion in Sequoia National Park. The short version of the stor…| 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
Recently we’ve been focusing on damage to the scientific enterprise being done by the current US administration (datasets vanishing, long term studies canceled, capricious grant revocations).…| 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
