Exciting News for Those of Us Who Believe in Science

As we all know, a disturbing amount of legitimate information has been removed from government websites since Trump has gotten into office. Years of studies, paid for by taxpayer dollars, proving that vaccines do, in fact, save lives. Information about how making COVID vaccines harder to obtain may have impacted the epidemic. Gender identity data in prisons, LGBTQ+ health information, HIV tracking tools, abortion rights information, National Park Service pages for Stonewall, Japanese American Internment Sites, and the Tuskegee Airmen, hate crime resources, and the National Law Enforcement Accountability Databases, to name just a few. Some of those got restored, in whole or in part, after a public outcry, but only a small number of them.

Fascist regimes rely heavily on the ability to control the narrative in order to remain in power. They are against all things scientific. They tend to target academic research and any historical information that does not support their narrative. They will attempt to alter the past and the present, they will deny scientific evidence regarding predictions of future events if it does not suit their needs, and they certainly do not want any way for people to obtain evidence about their illegal acts, so the whitewashing of government databases is no big surprise. They also revile the media and declare anything that contradicts their narrative to be fake news.

Another thing that fascists do at first is fire all the government bureaucrats who aren’t willing to play by their bent and twisted rules. (They save the harsher consequences for later.) The agency that took the hardest hit in the Trump administration was the Department of Education, which is down by about 50% of its staff. That’s shocking for the American people, but not a big surprise for fascism. Education is frowned upon in a system like that. Trump is trying to reduce the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by 95%, but there are a number of lawsuits and court orders that are hampering his progress. Most other departments seem to have taken a hit of somewhere between 5 and 25%.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is one of the world’s premier centers for climate science. It once had 13,000 employees until Trump discharged 800 of them. While doing so, he also had the website climate.gov reduced, split apart, reshuffled, relocated, and made much more difficult to access.

Climate.gov used to receive a million visitors a month. It contained information on climate science, including data, reports, articles, and congressionally mandated national climate assessments, and data and reports on climate-change-related disasters like wildfires, drought, and hurricanes, status reports, and key climate indicators, scientists’ blogs and resources for educators. It was designed to make that information free and easily accessible and understandable to the general public.

But some of those discharged staff members decided that cutting the public off from that information was unacceptable, because climate change is real, as the mountains of evidence indicate. It was often the only source to refute misinformation about climate change with understandable scientific context. So they recruited volunteers, including 80 scientists, to be subject matter experts and fact-checkers, and they crowd sourced about $280,000 and got a one-time grant from an anonymous donor, and Climate.us was born.

Now, since the site is no longer controlled by the government, they can also include information from other legitimate agencies outside of NOAA that have local and regional climate information, so it will be able to provide even more detail. But it will remain non-partisan and fact-based. It won’t tell you what to do or how to feel about climate change. It will simply explain the science and tell you what the data show.

You can find this, and other useful climate date on the Climate.us website.

I’m sorry. From the title of this blog post, you probably thought I was telling you about a solution to global warming, huh? Nope. But at least we can track our spiral down the drain again. That’s something, at least, right? And we get to spit in the eye of a fascist while doing so. An added bonus.

Check out the new site. I spent about an hour wandering around in there, and I was in nerd heaven. It’s such a relief that there are people out there who are willing to fight the good fight. Without them, we’d have everyone in congress having snowball fights, thinking they were proving some ridiculous, ignorant point. (I wonder if that guy is the same one who thought that islands float and could tip over? Sheesh. What a national embarrassment.)