A War on Reality: The Administration’s Deliberate Blinding of Climate Science

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In a move of such breathtaking and malicious stupidity that it amounts to a declaration of war on reality itself, the Felonious Punk administration is systematically dismantling the nation’s ability to monitor and understand the Earth’s changing climate. According to budget documents and internal presentations, the administration is scrapping a series of critical satellite instruments under the absurd pretext that they are not related to the “essential task of predicting the weather.” This is not a budget cut; it is an act of deliberate, ideological blinding. It is a cynical and dangerous attempt to enforce a political narrative by unplugging the very machines that are designed to tell us the truth, a decision that will not only leave the nation more vulnerable to the long-term ravages of climate change but will, in the short term, actively harm the accuracy of our daily weather forecasts.

The Purge of the Satellites

The administration’s hit list is a catalog of some of the most important tools we have for understanding our planet. Two instruments on the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, which have spent the last decade providing unprecedented detail on the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere, are being deemed “beyond their prime mission” and will be taken offline. Two other critical instruments are being stripped from the next generation of geostationary satellites, the GeoXO program. The Atmospheric Composition Instrument, which would have tracked air pollution from sources like wildfire smoke on an hourly basis, and the Ocean Color Instrument, designed to monitor the health of coastal waters and warn of toxic algal blooms, have both been marked for termination in order to “deliver a weather-only instrument manifest.”

This purge is the direct implementation of the right-wing policy playbook, Project 2025, which explicitly calls for the dismantling of climate research that it claims drives the “climate change alarm industry.” It is a purely ideological project, designed to eliminate any data that contradicts the administration’s fossil fuel-centric agenda.

The Scientific Illiteracy of a False Dichotomy

The entire justification for this scientific sabotage rests on a foundation of profound and willful ignorance: the idea that one can draw a hard line between “weather” and “climate.” As any real scientist will tell you, this is a complete and utter fallacy. “Weather versus climate. It is one and the same,” said Lars Peter Riishojgaard, director of the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center at the University of Maryland. The weather is what is happening outside your window right now. Climate is the long-term pattern of data that tells you what kind of weather to expect. “You now cannot do weather prediction without understanding the climate,” Riishojgaard explained.

Accurate modern weather forecasting depends entirely on the nearly 50-year record of satellite data that allows computer models to understand the baseline conditions of the Earth’s systems. To deliberately stop collecting this data is, as former NOAA official Monica Medina put it, a profound dereliction of duty. “The weather isn’t political. The climate isn’t political. These are facts that we can know and be prepared to deal with, or not,” she said. “I can’t imagine turning off satellites showing there were incoming attacks to our country. Why would we turn off the satellites that show incoming weather?”

A Pattern of Willful Blindness

This assault on the satellite programs is not an isolated incident. It is part of a broad, systematic campaign to blind the nation to the reality of climate change. Since taking office, the administration has taken down government websites that host climate research, canceled grants for climate-related research, and even stopped maintaining a public list of weather disasters that cause more than a billion dollars in damage. The goal is simple: if the government doesn’t collect or report the data, then, in the administration’s view, the problem doesn’t exist.

The profound stupidity of this approach is that reality has a way of intruding, whether you are looking at it or not. In a perfect and telling illustration of this, the Pentagon announced earlier this year that it would stop sharing a different set of satellite data used to track hurricanes. After a furious outcry from meteorologists who explained that this data was essential for their forecasts, the administration was forced into a humiliating reversal. Their anti-science ideology crashed directly into the reality of a hurricane, and reality won.

A Dereliction of Duty

The administration’s war on climate science is more than just a political disagreement. It is a profound and dangerous dereliction of the most basic duty of any government: to protect its citizens from foreseeable harm. By deliberately choosing to fly blind, to unplug the sensors and ignore the data, they are not just indulging a foolish and anti-science ideology. They are actively and knowingly making every American more vulnerable to the wildfires, the floods, the hurricanes, and the other extreme weather events that are the undeniable reality of a warming planet.