Three recent news items illustrate the Trump Administration’s contempt for science and its attempt to degrade the information we need to manage water problems and other environmental issues:
1. “US Government to Stop Tracking the Costs of Extreme Weather,” New York Times (gift link)
NOAA’s “billion-dollar disaster” database is a critical resource for understanding how weather-related disasters are affecting the US economy. It is the data source behind many analyses, including Table 7-1 in my book, which shows that coastal storms alone are responsible for the majority of weather-related damages, as well as the image below from the National Climate Assessment, which illustrates the increase over time in water-related disasters (driven by both climate change and development patterns). Arbitrarily shuttering this database – which has continuous data going back to 1980 – is foolish and short-sighted. In the short term, the administration may be able to obscure the costs of climate change, but reality gets the final vote.
Source: National Climate Assessment, 2023
2. “Two Scientific Groups Say They’ll Keep Working on US Climate Assessment,” New York Times (gift link)
The National Climate Assessment, required by the Global Change Research Act of 1990, provides an invaluable synthesis of how climate change is affecting the US, and what we are doing to adapt to it and mitigate its worst effects. The fifth assessment was published in 2023 and the sixth assessment is underway – except that the Trump Administration dismissed all the scientists working on it. AGU and AMS, two scientific groups, are picking up the slack, although heir product will not be a government document and will not meet the requirements imposed by Congress in 1990. Not publishing the NCA will not make climate change go away, it will just make us less able to manage it.
3. “The EPA Will Likely Gut Team That Studies Health Risks From Chemicals,” Wired
IRIS – the Integrated Risk Information System – is an EPA database that provides scientifically-based assessments of toxicity and health risk for hundreds of chemicals. Some within industry and Congress have long called for its elimination, mostly because they found the reality that it presents to be inconvenient. Again, not having good data on chemical toxicity may allow industry to keep using certain chemicals, but it won’t make us safer in the long run!
