Donald Trump, climate change, climate deniers and Sharpies
A recent letter writer asked a great question about how does climate change figure in daily weathercasts. The multi-layered answer involves the Biden administration dealing with the lethal legacy of the former administration’s explicit efforts to scrub climate change information from government websites and gutting science-based departments, such as the Commerce Department.
Why the Commerce Department? Well, Commerce is in charge of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Under NOAA is the National Weather Service (NWS). The Commerce Department should more aptly be called the Department of Science & Technology due to the amount of data collected, especially by the NWS. Under Trump, Commerce Secretary Wilbur “Bend the Truth” Ross had no intention of focusing on that. If weather data is also climate data, and climate data was scrubbed, then where did it go? Despite being paid for by taxpayers (i.e., us), this data was suppressed and made inaccessible by for profit companies such as AccuWeather and the Weather Channel to again charge people (i.e., us again) to access weather data.
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These media companies are worth millions due to marketing, repackaging, and profiting from NWS data paid for by you and me because guess what? The NWS is forbidden by law to advertise the value of its services (check out weather.gov, enter your ZIP code and voila. For free). In addition, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) there is the National Center for Biotechnology Information where one can read about The Silencing Science Tracker. This tracker documents the undermining of anti-science actions taken by federal, state and local governments.
As Paul Krugman recently wrote, a 30-point gap exists between Republicans and Democrats regarding levels of trust in the scientific community. One can infer who has less trust in science. Krugman also stated an uncomfortable fact that the climate war is now part of the culture war. Remember the former POTUS’ Sharpie-altered NOAA hurricane map? Would that we all have sharpies to highlight climate change and focus on solutions, using science and data, and no longer pretend nothing is going on.
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