Not just on Iran’s nukes and the Venezuelan President. On science itself, we are told. Our friend Roger Pielke Jr. just put out his “Top Five Climate Science Scandals 2025” and one of them, #3, is “The Trump Administration’s Campaign of Vengeance as Science Policy”. And we are genuinely sympathetic to his concerns. But we also think that if climate science had wanted to avoid the public coming to hate it and cheer its demise, it would have avoided polemical blunders like RPJ’s other scandals like “An Undeniably Fake Dataset Used in Research and Promoted in Assessments” or the U.S. National Climate Assessment being horribly politicized by Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden. As Pielke Jr. has himself asked on this subject, “What Did We Expect Would Happen?”. And we ask, now that the predictable has arrived, have they learned any lessons that might help make it stop?

Heck no. Referring to Administration plans to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO, The Atlantic hollers “The U.S. Is on the Verge of Meteorological Malpractice” because:

“The Trump administration says it will dismantle a premier climate center, while somehow keeping weather forecasting intact.”

Let us concede, for purposes of argument and illustration, that the publication is correct that cutting funding to NCAR is a bad idea and that dismantling it as Trump apparently plans to is “meteorological malpractice”. What should climate scientists have done in the last decade or so to make such a proposal unthinkable or, if thought and even said, undoable? Does it now seem in retrospect to have been a good idea to involve all the major U.S. government weather and climate agencies in a full-court press on behalf of extreme alarmism, including fiddling past temperature records, employing bogus computer scenarios like RCP 8.5, using obviously flawed data sets, and cancelling skeptics and critics? Or should they have encouraged an atmosphere of real debate and, what’s that thing, oh yeah, science that revels in the unexpected and in challenging established wisdom?

Here’s the New York Times “Climate Forward” on that same NCAR story:

“The Trump administration said it will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions.”

And are there two sides to the story? Heck no. NCAR good Trump bad:

“The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters around the country, and its scientists study a broad range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming.”

So only blockheads and know-nothings could object. Now the article did go on that:

“in a social media post announcing the move late on Tuesday, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, called the center ‘one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country’ and said that the federal government would be ‘breaking up’ the institution. Mr. Vought wrote that a ‘comprehensive review is underway’ and that ‘any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.’”

So the weather forecasting work, which already is distributed across several other agencies, will continue. Is there some logical argument for rearranging NCAR’s functions? Not every bureaucratic entity is a marvel of efficiency, after all. But you don’t win a prize for guessing that “experts say” Trump equals dunce:

“Scientists, meteorologists and lawmakers said the move was an attack on critical scientific research and would harm the United States…. It is now widely considered a global leader in both weather and climate change research, with programs aimed at tracking severe weather events, modeling floods and understanding how solar activity affects the Earth’s atmosphere. For decades, the center has operated with the freedom to develop outside-the-box ideas that have advanced weather forecasting…. Scientists said dismantling the center’s climate research would do irreparable damage to cutting-edge meteorology and advances in weather forecasting.”

See? “Scientists said” just as, such publications would have you believe, 97% of them said there was an urgent man-made climate crisis and it would be 5C warmer by 2100. And for bad measure, trot out one of the usual suspects:

“Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, wrote on X that the institution is ‘quite literally our global mother ship.’ She said nearly everyone who researches climate and weather around the world has worked at or with NCAR.”

No background on Hayhoe as a leading and notoriously ill-tempered alarmist. Just “experts say”. No, really:

“experts said much of the center’s activities focused on basic atmospheric science that had little to do with political debates over climate change.”

Which may be true. Indeed they quoted Pielke Jr. on that very point. But what of the complaints? They are brushed aside in favour of it being a Trump political vendetta on behalf of felons and morons, wrapping up with:

“In New Orleans, where many of the world’s top Earth science researchers are gathered for an annual meeting, Antonio Busalacchi, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which operates the center, said, ‘What we are seeing is the administration canceling the freedom of scientific thought and inquiry.’”

And what more impartial source could any publication find than… um… the head of the impugned institution?

To repeat, we do not say that what Donald Trump is doing is wise. Nor, at the risk of alienating some readers, do we think Donald Trump could pass a basic quiz on climate any more than, frankly, we think Al Gore could. But we do say that if “science” finds itself under attack in the United States for being politicized, dogmatic and loony-left, the best response would be to prove that it’s not, rather than striving to confirm the critics’ claims.

Any takers?