Republican War on Science Goes Full Scorched Earth

CNN:

The Trump administration’s proposed budget seeks to shut down the laboratory atop a peak in Hawaii where scientists have gathered the most conclusive evidence of human-caused climate change since the 1950s.

The Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaii has measured atmospheric carbon dioxide, which — along with other planet-warming pollution — has led directly to climate change, driving sea level rise, supercharging weather and destroying food systems.

The president’s budget proposal would also defund many other climate labs, including instrument sites comprising the US government’s greenhouse gas monitoring network, which stretches from northern Alaska to the South Pole.

But it’s the Mauna Loa laboratory that is the most prominent target of the President Donald Trump’s climate ire, as measurements that began there in 1958 have steadily shown CO2’s upward march as human activities have emitted more and more of the planet-warming gas each year.

The curve produced by the Mauna Loa measurements is one of the most iconic charts in modern science, known as the Keeling Curve, after Charles David Keeling, who was the researcher who painstakingly collected the data. His son, Ralph Keeling, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, now oversees collecting and updating that data.

Today, the Keeling Curve measurements are made possible by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration, but the data gathering and maintenance of the historical record also is funded by Schmidt Sciences and Earth Networks, according to the Keeling Curve website.

In the event of a NOAA shut down of the lab, Scripps could seek alternate sources of funding to host the instruments atop the same peak or introduce a discontinuity in the record by moving the instruments elsewhere in Hawaii.

Atlantic:

Clouds are the bane of a hurricane forecaster’s existence. Or they were, until about 20 years ago, when forecasters got access to a technology that Kim Wood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Arizona, told me to think of as cloud X-ray vision: It cuts through the cloud top to help generate a high-resolution, three-dimensional image of what’s happening below.

Known as the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder, or SSMIS, it rides on a series of satellites and allows forecasters to see a storm’s structure, which might otherwise be invisible. The Hurricane Hunter planes that fly into storms can also be used to generate three-dimensional storm images, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is responsible for hurricane forecasting, has only two of those aircraft. They can’t be everywhere at once. With the SSMIS, forecasters had an autonomous, powerful eye in the sky. But now the Department of Defense says it will cease processing and distributing the crucial imagery from this sensor at the end of this month. Losing these views threatens the National Hurricane Center’s ability to see what’s forming, Wood told me.

Colorado Public Radio:

A new budget proposal released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could end Colorado’s status as a global hotspot for federally funded climate research. 

The document posted to the agency’s website on Monday details cuts laid out by earlier budget documents. If approved by Congress, the plan for the agency’s upcoming 2026 fiscal year, beginning in October, would eliminate 17 percent of its nearly 13,000-person workforce and slash its annual budget by roughly $1.5 billion, a 30 percent cut below its funding for the last full fiscal year.

Those cuts would also eliminate the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the agency’s research arm charged with finding ways to improve weather and ocean forecasting. The office oversees four labs at the David Skaggs Research Center in Boulder: the Chemical Sciences Laboratory, the Global Monitoring Laboratory, the Global Systems Laboratory and the Physical Sciences Laboratory.

 Each of those labs would close under the proposed budget.