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From Union of Concerned Scientsts
Highlights
- 🌍 Historical Awareness: The author recalls first learning about climate change through Dr. Jim Hansen’s powerful testimony, showing the significant impact that pivotal moments can have on public consciousness.
- 📉 Severe Budget Cuts: Proposed budget cuts could severely restrict NOAA’s ability to conduct essential climate research, affecting a breadth of institutions and programs across the nation.
- 📉 Impact on Science: The planned eliminations of numerous research institutes and climate centers would cripple scientific endeavors that inform climate policy and hazard preparedness.
- 📊 Public Safety: With improved weather forecasting linked to NOAA’s research, cutting funding would likely result in higher economic costs and elevated risks to human life during severe weather events.
- 🚨 Call to Action: The author calls on citizens to rally their voices against these destructive policies, stressing the importance of collective action to protect climate science.
Do you remember the first time that climate change really entered your consciousness?
For me, it was the powerful Congressional testimony by the Director of NASA’s Goddard Space Institute, Dr. Jim Hansen, in 1988. What he was telling the world sounded unbelievable. But he was from NASA, one of our nation’s—and the world’s—premier science agencies, so I knew this was real. I was a distracted, big-haired teenager, frozen in my tracks. I’ve been working for climate solutions ever since.
Fast forward to today…
I know…
Our political crises are a lot to hold. But as part of the climate movement, you also know that climate change is the context in which all of these crises are unfolding. You know that if we are successful in slowing down or stopping the Trump administration’s authoritarian roll and restoring democracy, we still have this colossal global climate problem to contend with. What you may not know—what is just now becoming clear through leaked documents covered in the press—is that the administration is preparing to bring climate science in the United States to its knees. This illegal overreach will make the work of contending with climate change so much harder for many years to come.
We have to stop them.
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Read the full post at Union of Concerned Scientsts.
