Trump to scrap Nasa climate research in crackdown on “politicized science”

And so it begins. The Trump administration is targeting government agencies which produce “politicized science” — or as most of us call it, “science”! — and will be looking to defund those agencies. This story from the Guardian focuses on NASA, but no doubt EPA, NOAA, and other agencies which work on climate change and other areas of scientific research that the Republican party thinks of as “politicized science” will be targeted for budget cuts and more. It’ll be interesting to analyze the 2016 End of Term .gov crawl to see just how many .gov sites fundamentally change or completely disappear in the coming months.

Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said.

Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.

This would mean the elimination of Nasa’s world-renowned research into temperature, ice, clouds and other climate phenomena. Nasa’s network of satellites provide a wealth of information on climate change, with the Earth science division’s budget set to grow to $2bn next year. By comparison, space exploration has been scaled back somewhat, with a proposed budget of $2.8bn in 2017.

via Trump to scrap Nasa climate research in crackdown on ‘politicized science’.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.