Liberals in the legacy media have been busily setting their hair on fire this year, warning us of the various ways that the world will end if Donald Trump is returned to office for a second term. We’ve been warned that this will be “the last election of our lifetimes” because Trump will refuse to leave office and remain as a dictator for life. We are assured that Trump will “seek revenge” and punish his political opponents. (That’s a rich one coming from people who openly support the Biden crime family.) A new alarm is currently being sounded this week, however. The Guardian reports that “climate experts” are predicting that Trump will “break up” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He would supposedly do this to prevent the agency from talking about climate change.
Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests.
Joe Biden’s presidency has increased the profile of the science-based federal agency but its future has been put in doubt if Trump wins a second term and at a time when climate impacts continue to worsen.
This idea isn’t coming from anything that Trump has said, but rather from another set of proposals being put forth by the Heritage Foundation. They’ve done plenty of good work for conservatives and Trump has leaned on their advice in a variety of matters, including selecting judicial nominees. Some of the complaints about NOAA found in the Project 2025 document are valid. The agency has become far too aggressive and sweeping in its claims regarding climate change alarmism. But that doesn’t mean that Trump will follow those suggestions to the letter.
If Donald Trump is smart and receives good advice, he will make some personnel changes at the top of NOAA, but not disband it entirely. The agency currently operates ten satellites that are critical in tracking hurricanes and cloud cover information used by almost everyone. Predicting the weather remains difficult, bordering on soothsaying at times, but it’s still vastly more reliable than it was when I was young. There would be significant risks in turning that work over entirely to the private sector where it would be subject to profit considerations and economic concerns.
For their part, NOAA claims to be “largely neutral” on the subject of climate change. One former official stated that the agency has been “cautious” in reporting on climate effects and is “not pushing some agenda.” That’s not the impression I’ve gotten from them over the past few years, but to be honest, I don’t pay too much attention to NOAA outside of hurricane path predictions. And yet I’ve definitely seen some NOAA officials invoking the specter of climate change when talking about droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events.
Nobody in the government seems to approach their work these days without allowing the climate debate to color their language and influence their decisions. The sheer tonnage of cash that the Biden administration is flushing using climate change alarmism as an alibi is daunting. Trump could probably make a lot of progress by replacing Rick Spinrad at NOAA with someone more grounded and sensible. Spinrad is a Biden nominee and it shouldn’t be too difficult for his replacement to issue new marching orders, telling their people to stick to the data, report their findings about the atmosphere and the weather, and leave the climate debate to the politicians.