The production of ignorance is booming as its trajectory takes it from roots in advertising, then lobbying, then political campaigns to center stage in political strategy and official government business.
I suspect the academics who study culturally cultivated ignorance will be playing catchup for at least a decade after this administration!
It's a shame politicians can't be kept accountable tens of years from now. It would be great that if in 25 years it turns out global warming does indeed cause huge problems for humans, we could sue the politicians that took irresponsible risks with the environment. Now they can just focus on short term gains, and ignore all the long term side effects.
I really think we need to change the system to create some sort of accountability here. I think a number of people in the current government need to go prison.
whoa...whoa... hold on there, did you say "woke"? Sorry but they're going to outlaw being "woke", so they have to shut down all the institutions that spread "wokeness" first, and that includes any and all providing climate data.
Once they eradicate "wokeness" from the government, then they can just declare something or someone "woke" and then get punitive with them. Or at least that's one way I think it could play out given the actions being taken.
"You can't blame us for that, that was President Newsom's 2034 policy! Our climate expert says so, and his credentials is that he's the go-to climate expert that Fox News turns to whenever the libs talk about climate change!"...
And the J.D. Vance nominated judge will say "not guilty!"...
> It's a shame politicians can't be kept accountable tens of years from now. It would be great that if in 25 years it turns out global warming does indeed cause huge problems for humans, we could sue the politicians that took irresponsible risks with the environment. Now they can just focus on short term gains, and ignore all the long term side effects.
This is a super interesting perspective.. but instead of only looking to the future, could we apply this to the past?
aka Were there predictions about global warming in 2015, 2000, or earlier that drove policy that ended up being incorrect?
A good start for actually holding people accountable in the US would be prosecuting the entire chain of command responsible for blowing up unarmed South American boats and then murdering the survivors. That one's concrete, proven to have happened, and illegal under multiple standards of law, so if we can't at least make that happen anything else is unlikely.
I think a prohibition to lie to the public would already be incredibly impactful (if it had no statute of limitations and adequate punishments).
A delicate issue I see is how to handle personal matters that the public don't need to know.
Anyhow, you might think that it's hard to know when someone is really lying vs just being uninformed, but in truth in the long term most lies become apparent; while you couldn't prevent
every single lie, you'd reduce them enormously, in my opinion; even in countries where the president doesn't lie almost constantly.
I am a boomer and I absolutely give a "flying fink". Stop stereotyping my generation. The group I worked in at NASA Goddard did visualizations of climate data. I heard directly from climate scientists what was going on in the world and it terrified me. When I heard about what's being done to NCAR I nearly cried. I have no children but I have told all my friends' kids how sorry I am that we're leaving them a mess to clean up. How's that for a "flying fink"?
Better safe than sorry. If the risk is significant, and the impact is big, it is sensible to have plan to address risks. You probably have many expenses you hope you never need, like all sorts of insurances. And even if it turns out climate changes was less impactful than forcasted, change sparks innovation and creates economic opportunity. E.g, these days electrucs cars are better than fossil fuel cars (my wife wont let me lease another fossil fuel car, she likes the way the electric one drives much better), and solar electricity is cheaper than fossil electricity.
There are a vast number of scientists in agreement with each other that it is not a nothingburger.
It takes nothing but stark intentional ignorance to make a statement like yours.
It absolutely boggles my mind at the suggestion that green energy is all profit seeking, as if the counterparties in big oil aren't also just as or more interested in maintaining status quo in the opposite direction. Yet I never see someone who expresses ideas like this recognize or acknowledge that.
Switching to renewables and mass transit can improve the quality of life for people who live in urban environments because it makes the air they breath cleaner.
This is a major reason why developing countries are leapfrogging the west on this sort of stuff. Massive S.E. Asian cities are experiencing tremendous health benefits from the green revolution.
It's mostly built atop problem shifting. For example, Seattle fought to send their compost and build wind farms in eastern Washington - where it was in someone else's backyard.
Similar to battery recycling - which might end up being "recycled" by some 8 year old kid in SE Asia with a sledgehammer.
At worst the same way that performing CPR on a man with a heart attack is problem shifting, or feeding the hungry only makes them hungry again in the future.
Wind turbines are not problems. They are opportunities. Notice that thr specious bullshit problems cited with wind turbines go away in rural areas once farmers are the ones making money on them.
> It's mostly built atop problem shifting. For example, Seattle fought to send their compost and build wind farms in eastern Washington - where it was in someone else's backyard.
This is a silly opinion to have. It's like complaining that reinforcing police presence in an area is problem shifting because you'll still have crime taking place somewhere else. It's an attempt to frame any action as a false dilemma that forces an all-or-nothing logic based on specious reasoning.
If it doesn't turn into a nothingburger *, can we get back the glaciers, the climate and the people who died to help your own cronies get some more billions?
* (that is, if there's not a global conspiracy of pedo-scientists set to harm poor oil tycoons)
While I agree that the results of these policies are devastating, why blame the politicians? They were voted for, and it's not like they were hiding their agendas.
Well they kind of are, in that the real perps are not them but folks like the Koch family who fund entire think tanks and counter programming to serve their narrow interests. They give money to the politicians in exchange for this viewpoint. It gets woven into so much of a bubbles fabric that it becomes self-reinforcing.
Again, if the voters bought it they are responsible for it and not the advocates. There is a reason that nobody named in the Epstein files is running a normalize pedophilia campaign. Because contrary to the rhetoric about money being the end all in politics it doesn't work for everything.
People as a whole are not experts in every possible area, nor is everyone universally smart. When politics get bought at an entire party level for decades, it’s hard to place blame on those who allow it. Don’t forget that culture wars is used as a wedge such that everything is combined. People don’t get to vote on their issues, they vote on buckets of viewpoints.
Fox News literally had a segment on the difference between pedophilia and some other philia whose name I forget.. it was basically saying hey they weren’t 5, they were 14-16! That’s different! Wonder why they’d feel the need to air that viewpoint…
(I'm including in this replies to both the comment immediately above and your comment two levels up from that)
> Well they kind of are, in that the real perps are not them but folks like the Koch family who fund entire think tanks and counter programming to serve their narrow interests.
The Kochs also fund Nova on PBS which has produced and continues to produce a large amount of in-depth scientifically accurate reporting about climate change.
> People as a whole are not experts in every possible area, nor is everyone universally smart
But there are experts and there are smart people who write about what they experts say. Someone doesn't have to be either an expert themself or smart themself to realize that they should try to find what those experts and those smart people think in important areas so they can better choose politicians who will handle policy in those areas correctly.
A heck of a lot of voters put in less effort looking into competing claims of rival Presidential candidates than they do to check out the claims of rival manufacturers when they want to buy an air fryer.
Yes, the politicians that do bad things should be blamed, but I'm also going to blame the people who voted for them if the politicians said they would do those things and even a little research by the voter would have turned up that those things are bad.
> "one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country."
It's amazing how fast free speech has been destroyed in the past year. Especially when it comes to censorship of science and science's conclusions.
However, I heard many many more people complaining about a lack of free speech in 2023 and 2024 than now. I really wonder what happened to all those principles! It's shocking.
"When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles,"
The two recent examples I can think of are the Gaza ceasefire, as well as the general concept (and not actual implementation) of re-industrializing the USA in the context of China's dominance.
Call me when the party starts. Many of the decisions this administration has made are having the opposite impact. The re-industrialization of the US (what little bit of it there is) is in spite of the trump administration, not because of it.
Well, people are still dying despite the ceasefire and the reindustrialization seems mostly to build data centers. What parts of these do you think are good?
Has there actually been a ceasefire in practice? People are still dying, guns are still being fired afaik. And the broader plan does not instill confidence with Tony Blair proposed as a technocratic leader of the area
Of course I have no sway, politically or otherwise, but I would have happily given credit to Trump where it was due if it panned out.
But Israel does not seem to have abided by the ceasefire, and the larger peace plan now feels like it's going to be stitch up for the Palestinian people.
I tried to help them steelman this but the only couple examples of good things I could come up with, I’ve not seen liberals complain about. Hm. Coming up blank.
All these come from the white house press directly which has painted them in a glowing light but it remains to be seen if they are actually good things.
The administration is crooked. Nothing they do can be trusted. Especially when they attack science and reduce funding for critical programs
After significantly more searching, you managed to cite less criticisms of Trump’s “good actions” by liberals than you managed to cite “good actions” themselves, and then to top it all off you tried to weakly justify that conclusion with some trite aphorism about individualism encompassing many outcomes.
Yes, you're right, I should google to make your arguments for you!
Listing a bunch of white house links and then 2 criticisms (edit: he got it up to about 6 criticisms of marijuana legislation, wow!) which aren't even really about the action but more about the general malfeasance of the administration is an extremely weak supporting argument behind "liberals criticize anything good Trump does the same way conservatives criticized anything good Biden did", because we can identify plentiful examples of naked hypocrisy around the criticisms of Biden - see the autopen debacle for one hilariously manufactured self-owning example.
It must really be quite trying to justify Trump's actions, I'm amazed you have failed to use any of that energy on introspection.
It's a problem how many people seemingly have broken lie detectors these days. I blame social media for this one: far too easy to find a truthy bubble that validates your beliefs.
They say much worse things about me! Donald Trump, the leader of the MAGA people, released a Christmas greeting calling me scum (https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1157772703684...) - I've never done that and would never do that to even my worst political opponents. I don't understand why people persist in drawing this false equivalence. Are you in a media bubble where you don't see the things Trump says and does?
> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then - yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
Another example of leftists not understanding things that are obvious. Just because you're protesting doesn't mean you can do things that would be illegal if you weren't protesting. That I have to explain this to you is really annoying.
This doesn't really have anything to do with constitutional "free speech". This is a government agency, not the personal research blog of a private citizen.
Government agencies don't have "free speech".
That said, it's a shame this is happening. Maybe a future administration will reopen it.
Trump tried to overturn an election and failed, he’s a moron but he won’t make the same mistake again. The next US elections will be rigged, if there are even elections.
It seems the poster is of the low probability belief that at some point before Nov 2028 elections will be suspended and we will move to some kind of imperial system instead.
The issue is that even if I win that bet, they’re paying me my winnings in USD, which is backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government, which has been irreparably destroyed.
If I can buy, say, low probability insurance that that will give me a squad of mercenaries and a jet to a bunker somewhere safe, I’d be far more apt to put my money where my mouth is.
It’s not a bad bet. It’s just a dumb bet. The payout doesn’t match the risk.
How big would the risk be in your view that you would loose the bet? In any risk-benefit situation, the first step is to define the probability of the risk.
The usual way for this to happen doesn’t involve suspending elections. And I’d not bet on a guy that old and infirm winning again in 2028 even if he could legally run.
We’ll see how ICE at select polling places and iffy federal-run voter role purges go in 2026. Should set the tone for how far they try to go in 2028.
I think that's a reasonable worry, but I'd encourage you to make sure you do remember this prediction, and update accordingly if they don't suppress votes or the voter suppression doesn't work. I was worried about Elon Musk's efforts to buy off a Wisconsin judicial election earlier this year and became a lot more confident in democracy when it didn't work at all.
One of the two things I mentioned is already happening, and it’ll be pretty surprising if the Republican army isn’t used for voter intimidation. Why even have it, if not for that kind of thing?
It’s not like they didn’t already use both covert and overt means to try to overturn an election, and get caught red-handed on both (I mean, one was televised live, so…) Much cleaner to put in the effort on Election Day itself.
Polling places closing early, terrible weather, computers off-line, etc., will of course drive people from voting. Seeing an ICE agent isn't going to deter a citizen from voting any more than deter people taking vacations overseas. I'd be more than happy to show ID to vote as the rest of the world does.
India can do it. They had a caste system and yet conduct fair and honest. We can do it too.
Long horizon events like this on Polymarket stabilize around a % odds corresponding to time value of money. You can get 4% buying risk free CDs for that horizon.
this is not true - if you know for certaint that trump will be president through winning an election in 2028 you can make over 20X your money.
at the end of the day people don't actually believe it, which is why trump is valued little. people who aren't willing to bet with their money on things they say so absolutely aren't serious people.
I am not sure that is a useful principle. I tend to keep an umbrella around in the car regardless whether the forecast calls for rain. Do these people similarly avoid stock markets, insurance, and similar products in the risk space?
your scenario here doesn't really make any sense. one you're conflating getting married with staying together. you could get married and then divorced. two, such a bet wouldn't make sense since it could easily be rigged (and indeed this is what happens with sports betting).
again, if someone says they know the winning lottery and they don't play, they're unserious. nearly impossible to rig, high payout - outcome is of interest to layperson.
The idea was that I figured you’d consider that some things are valuable in ways that don’t involve money. Unfortunately I think the conclusion here is that you actually truly believe that there is nothing that cannot be bet if a suitable market could be formed for it. Of course, I should have realized this, because by placing bets in general you are in fact taking a financial position in the concept of betting markets.
If Trump indeed manages to turn the country into a dictatorship I think winning money on polymarket is going to be the last thing you'll be thinking about
A more charitable explanation is that people believe in a larger set of nearly equivalent outcomes that are not captured in that market.
Some possible outcomes (I personally don't believe they are very probable), but...
There is no "call" or inaugurated at all, Trump stays on via some kind of "emergency". The market will fail to resolve to an outcome (based on what it says).
Somehow (via a normal election, or the outcome being decided in the House) one of Trumps sons becomes president.
This, I think, illustrates some of the problems with far out edge cases in prediction markets. Nailing down all of the possible outcomes exactly is hard.
My understanding is that, in many ways, government agencies are more constitutionally protected speech-wise than private entities, precisely because any hierarchical attempt to punish them for their speech would be coming from the government rather than private entities. IANAL (or even American) though so grain of salt.
In any case, a lot of the right-wing hypocrisy around free speech that was being called out by OP didn't have much to do with constitutionally protected freedom of speech either - it was complaining about things like private companies (e.g. Twitter) shadowbanning people.
This is incorrect. Government agencies have exactly zero free speech rights. They are part of the Executive Branch and as such are instrumentalities of the President. Full stop.
"The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." U.S. Const., Art. II, Sec. 1, cl. 1.
Any discussion about the constitution and jurisprudence and rights should probably be assumed to be referring to the Before Times, when those things still mattered. Sigh.
The complaints about “free speech” I heard from conservatives over the past five years often had nothing to do with constitutional free speech, either. They were almost always directed at private companies and organizations moderating content; from time to time someone would try to claim a government nexus, but it was rare and always something like a request to take down some content (that often got rejected.) Given that we’ve spent years having a broad conversation about the principle of free speech, to suddenly demand that we restrict the conversation to one about pure First Amendment requirements seems a bit disingenuous.
Speech is important. Scientific speech more important. A government right now is using its power to selectively defund and wipe out big chunks of scientific research and communications that ultimately exist to protect your future. You should be livid and working to inform people how dangerous this is, not making poor excuses.
> A government right now is using its power to selectively defund and wipe out big chunks of scientific research and communications that ultimately exist to protect your future.
This is the significant point. The govt is defunding yet another scientific research institute. To me it seems more productive to get more specific and more substantive from there: How much of the research presently carried out at NCAR will continue? Are there alternative institutes or sources of funding that might save some of it? What are the likely tangible implications? Is the whole place even closing down or just some of it?
Going in the other direction, less specific, more amorphous abstraction about whether or not this is a free speech issue risks derailing the conversation into semantics.
There are interesting questions about wider meaning of free speech than what's protected by the first amendment, but getting moralistic because someone doesn't consider this a free speech issue, while you both agree that it's government defunding a research institute, and that it's bad, seems unnecessarily fractious
You’re responding to is Matthew Green, who has done more for deployed cryptography and internet privacy than most people alive. He has absolutely “hit the pavement”
> They were almost always directed at private companies and organizations moderating content
Yes. They were motivated by private individuals losing their livelihood, rather than by organizations losing government funding that was not a priori owed to them.
> You should be livid and working to inform people how dangerous this is, not making poor excuses.
They are masters of projection and compartmentalization.
These are the same people who were "being censored by the media" while going on Fox News to complain about it.
Whining about freedom of speech, or the "demise of Western values", while banning school libraries worth of classic works of western literature for being "subversive".
Their heads would probably explode reading Plato or J.S. Mill.
I’m from EU but here’s my take on this. This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Nobody forbids those people from NCAR to speak up. The administration simply doesn’t want to pay to cultivate their freedom of speech because NCAR is funded in 95% by the federal government.
If the government defunds you because they don’t like the research you’re publishing, is that not a freedom of speech issue? Definitely seems like it would have a chilling effect on what the institute would want to talk about, no?
No. There is no “you” in this context. There is ”itself”. They don’t want to pay for it because they apparently don’t agree with the outcome. The government is willingly giving up its own right to speak at its own expense. Those 800 people who will get laid off can start a gofundme and continue their own free speech.
Not such a shock for people paying attention. Groups have been pushing back about inequality and climate, healthcare, for decades and just ignored. Every political issue in our faces now was called out as a future problem years ago by various groups. Water is finally too hot now for frogs in the middle of pot.
Free speech doesn't create an obligation. It's not a binding magic. It's irrelevancy hasn't just happened. It's been a slow death.
The shift to information age and science education did not start until after the Boomers and much of GenX were in and out of school and college. The world for them was cheap and just winging it. Science! Bah! Uncle Rico can still throw them balls over that mountain!
Was warning people 15 years ago the now 80 year olds in charge are nihilistic and not going to change; they will be dead and are just trolling youth about caring. They’re self selecting biology.
Takes $800k/yr to have the buying power $200k/yr had in 1980. The rise in inequality and the global temperature follow a growth pattern that was way too normal to be winging it; what's been allowed economically has been very carefully studied and managed to preserve freedom of agency for the elders. Same as environment:
The right has destroyed free speech when compared to all the people up in arms about the left basically pushing around the edges, trying to prevent genocidal propaganda from being dispersed.
Even calling what the national lab does "alarmism" is objectively a lie meant to distort and politicize basic and important science. I don't need to tell you the political party of the person from the quote because that political party has been working for six a long time to take non-partisan science and politicize it and use that politicization to divide the country.
There is no national lab producing "alarmism" and calling it that as justification for cutting funding is meant as a justification for restricting free speech and free science.
I'm not sure how/why you are asserting this is a "free speech" or "free science" issue. The government isn't obligated to fund this (or any) lab - private donors are free to step in and continue funding.
Wealthy people fund all sorts of non-profitable things, ie. non-profits, charities, philanthropic initiatives, etc.
Look at Bill Gate's philanthropy over the years. There's thousands of others, including all of the Hollywood Celebrities that like to crow about the climate so much.
The NCAR was spending less than $150MM per year - it's not some outrageous amount of money for donors to fund.
>... calling [something] [an inherently subjective term] is objectively...
Sorry, I don't follow. At any rate, you're replying to a post that gave object examples of things that actually happened, and you made not attempt to explain why the things the other person considered unreasonable are actually reasonable.
> calling it that as justification for cutting funding is meant as a justification for restricting free speech
Freedom of speech as a philosophical concept does not entail entitlement to funding, never mind 1A.
You're complaining about the level of weather notifications. Those exist because people die in the heat and they die in big storms and now there's more technology to make people think about it before driving their car into a flash flood.
There are severe weather alerts even in red-states that don't believe the climate is changing at all. Because they do notice when people die.
Maybe that's too much "big government" for you tastes - "oh no, they made my phone beep!" - but...
That's not really the same thing as research into knowing what is going on long-term.
>your computer will scream at you in bright red text it's hot outside. You'll even receive emergency messages on your phone, tv and radio from the government when it reaches triple-digits
We get “weather warnings” here in the UK, too. To my ears, they sound “alarmist”, but I’m in London which has a relatively stable and comfortable microclimate.
Howvmever: it’s definitely the case that climate patterns have shifted. London used to get some snow, most winters. Since about 2015 it’s had almost none. The transitions from one season to the next used to be clear, now they’re vague. Our summers keep hitting higher and higher peaks.
Elsewhere in the UK we’re getting more rain. Flooding is increasingly common, and deeper, in several regions. Each year for the past 5 it seems to get a little worse. I hear insurance prices are changing to reflect it.
So, I think both things are true. There’s some alarmism, and also the climate is changing. The alarm seems justified to me.
In Portland, where I used to live, there are more hundred-plus-degree days and heat deaths in the last decade than in the city's entire recorded history. The city has had to open cooling centers for extended periods every summer for vulnerable people, something that was never needed before outside of specific single-year exceptional heat waves.
If you can't see how obviously in peril the planet is, you're just ignorant. It isn't "alarmist", it's reality. Here's the data I'm basing my opinions on:
IF you have other data that doesn't show the temperature rising consistently and rather concerningly, then go ahead and share it.
Until those graphs start going down, we can project that they just keep going up. No, the world isn't ending "$NEXT_YEAR", nor will it "end", but it will become extremely uncomfortable and rather dire for billions of people if the current trend continues - and it could happen a lot faster than you would be able to estimate. That's why climate science is so important. We have to act, or the world is very likely to end up in a bad, bad place.
The big problem is more heat amplifies the problems and accelerates the heating. Those charts in the near future are likely to hockey-stick at some point, and then I'd like to see the gymnastics people will have to do to handwave it away.
It seems you're unaware just how many people are climate change sceptics - and not just in the uneducated groups, it's all over the spectrum.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised about this at all. If anything, I think it might even be the same cause: because climate change sceptics were being suppressed before Trump.
To be upfront: I'm not American, but it's hard not to notice how the narrative has changed all over the internet.
My personal perspective to the climate crisis has always been a defeatist attitude, I was always in favor of green energy etc, but that's primarily because it would also improve the local area, Air quality etc. from a climate change perspective, it was always pointless, because that's a global issue and cannot be solved by internal regulation in a singular country
> It seems you're unaware just how many people are climate change sceptics
What does the number of people that oppose the science have to do with anything in my comment?
People are stopping th research because they don't like the results, and make up lies about it (like calling it "alarmism") in order to censor further results.
They are willing to stop all sorts of basic weather results because of it.
How could I not be aware of the number of people, and what does that have to do with anything? Your comment seems to be operating on some logic that is not explained and that I can not guess.
We can't afford scientist in Europe anymore, we have pensions to pay.
I suppose China does not need american scientist to work in China. They just need to make sure they can't work in the US. Which they are doing.
The only "funny" outcome is that they manage to fund a startup that develops tools to alleviate climate change, and explicitly reserve them to countries and states that believed in climate change in the first place.
But that would be mean. So, of course Florida can have it. It will just be slightly expensive for them.
The situation reminds me of that New Yorker comic: "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders"
Governments should be responsible for preventing these types of externalities as one of their core functions. There is no incentive for markets, consumers, and companies to deal with this, yet the forecast costs of climate change and sea level rise are (and will be) massive. Many places have some weak patchwork framework of private insurance and FEMA style funds, but without an actual pricing and enforcement system there's no way out of the warming feedback loop.
I was extremely disappointed in the failure of my (Canada's) government to articulate what a carbon tax was or how it worked to voters, and that allowed the opposition from both sides to chip at it until now it's a politically toxic idea.
The game theory of international accords is increasingly falling apart and countries will try to undercut each other on carbon pricing.
I've been sitting here in front of my keyboard for a while thinking of a nice way to say it, but I just can't come up with anything. So I'll just state the plain and obvious seen from a European (Danish) perspective:
America is moving fast towards some sort of fascism, and noone seems to be doing anything about it. So if you are American this is the time for you to rise up and show the rest of the world that there is another America. If you don't noone else will, and things will only get worse.
I'll leave you with a few quotes to get you started on your journey back towards a functional democracy:
"A little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical" - Thomas Jefferson
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they've tried everything else" - Winston Churchill
Elizabeth Willing Powel: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" to Which Benjamin Franklin replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
My wife worked there when we first met. She told me she knew where there was a Cray-1 sitting at the bottom of a stair well. Obviously this raised my level of interest. We went up there on the weekend and took each other's photo sitting on it. From memory it was a very low serial number having been shipped to <some-TLA> first then subsequently moved to NCAR. I also peered through the glass at various exotica in the machine room: YMP, KSR, TM that sort of thing. Great first date.
The question is why is NCAR a distinct entity from NOAA which work on the same/similar subjects and is also funded by the government?
I am not sure but maybe because this lab is a relic of the 50s and the cold war when when both the Soviets and the US were racing to create a weather control weapon...
Science is distributed. Lots of researchers at lots of different institutions research overlapping topics. That's part of its strength. In the U.S. most basic research is funded by federal grants. And as a results you'll find that research in pretty much any science area you can imagine is funded by federal grants going to multiple different institutions. In this case you're confusing things by bringing in NOAA which is a government agency (part of the Dept of Commerce). NCAR is a non-profit organization and competes for federal grant dollars with researchers at many other institutions (mostly universities). So in that sense there is a strong parallel here to Trump wanting to shut down Harvard (another non-profit organizations at which many different researchers work) and someone saying "doesn't Stanford do research on similar topics?" Yes, there is some conceptual overlap, but in detail there is not. The bigger difference is that Harvard has a big endowment and so can survive (at some level) if the federal grants it has been getting stop flowing. NCAR can't. Also, NCAR happens to have the experts and equipment (supercomputers) to do research that few other organizations can (none really in the U.S.). Harvard probably can't lay claim to that except in very narrow niches....
For perspective the annual budget for NCAR is about half the amount being spend on the new White House ballroom.
HN is for curious conversation, not ideological battle. The guidelines are clear about this and HN is only a place where people want to participate because we have those guidelines and uphold them every day.
If you know in advance you're going to be downvoted, you're conceding that you're not willing to bother trying to engage in this discussion in the spirit of curious conversation. Bludgeoning people over the head with your points, each prefaced with the word "fact" in all-caps is not curious conversation and is not the intended use of HN.
We want this to be a place where difficult topics can be discussed and heterodox positions can be presented, but that can only happen if people make an effort to be conversational and persuasive rather than belligerent.
Please don't reply to a guidelines-breaking comment with another one. Ideological battle is against the guidelines here whether you initiate it or perpetuate it.
“Digging in on dying technologies” is an interesting framing.
There is no appetite for oil alternatives that would stop this from meaning the deaths of hundreds of thousands or more people.
The fact is there is no effective way to power a stable grid with modern renewables. Increasing the energy mix sustainably is great. But if people truly want to divest from oil and coal there number one issue right now should be how to onboard nuclear energy effectively. This has been true for decades at this point, but purist policies on the right and the left have left it completely unrealized or actively dismantled it.
Solar and batteries get cheaper to build and maintain every year (almost to an absurd degree, seriously, look at the charts for the past 2 decades), while nuclear stays the same price.
That's not to say that nuclear power is bad to have, but there's an extremely obvious trajectory here of cheap battery-backed solar everywhere, with few regulatory hurdles and obvious incentives for people to have their own mini solar systems and batteries that take load off the larger grid.
We can debate how much nuclear is needed, but renewables can do a lot, and just hoping that AI will bring nuclear fusion in 5 years is not a great strategy
The production of ignorance is booming as its trajectory takes it from roots in advertising, then lobbying, then political campaigns to center stage in political strategy and official government business.
I suspect the academics who study culturally cultivated ignorance will be playing catchup for at least a decade after this administration!
(Assuming they are still around, of course.)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology