Donald Trump doesn’t believe in climate change and he’s doing everything he can to defund research on it. There’s an overwhelming scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is disrupting the climate. Now, some scientists are reportedly taking the president to court so they can continue their research.
Trump has been attempting to break up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and the institution has challenged his targeting, calling it “a widespread and coordinated campaign of punishment and coercion.” The NCAR is a federally funded research center, but the issue lies in where the center is based.
Normally, Trump doesn’t need a motivation to go after conventional climate wisdom. This year alone, the president has gone on a rampage targeting key Obama-era scientific rulings, particularly those concerning how greenhouse gases affect public health, and has even posted misleading memes about winter disproving climate change. But according to the NCAR, this move is political because they are based in Boulder, Colorado.
Colorado must suffer
Trump doesn’t get along with the state’s governor, Jared Polis, and — just as was the case with Tim Walz, JB Pritzker, and Gavin Newsom — the president is again being accused of looking into how the state runs its affairs, identifying what doesn’t align with his policies, and then throwing it into disarray until the governor finally does what he wants.
According to NBC, the lawsuit against Trump was filed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), a group of colleges and universities that operate the center in Colorado. Reportedly, federal agencies — including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Commerce Department, and the Office of Management and Budget — are targeting UCAR and NCAR, attempting to shut them down because Trump has issues with Polis over election fraud claims.
This centers on a MAGA clerk who was convicted on state charges of tampering with election machines, so only Polis can pardon her. Trump has not given a clear reason why he wants the clerk freed, but he has also added that he wants Polis to ban mail-in voting for the upcoming midterms.
UCAR released a statement on its website saying the Trump targeting may “pose a direct threat to national security, public safety, and economic prosperity, and risk destroying the country’s global leadership in weather and space weather modeling and forecasting.”
Trump has been calling anything to do with climate change a hoax, even at times claiming that the hoax originates from China. You’d think he would then want American scientists to continue researching it. But to Trump, everything is politics — specifically short-term politics.
