NCAR Campus,Boulder, Colorado. Architect: I. M. Pei. Credit: U CAR
Destruction Of NCAR Will Usher In Dark Ages Part II
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Did you know there is a National Center for Atmospheric Research located in Boulder, Colorado? Most Americans don’t. But one person who does is the serial sexual predator who is the so-called president of the United States. Like the Wicked Witch of the West, he has unleashed his coven of flying monkeys to destroy it.
To MAGAlomaniacs, NCAR is a symbol of all that is wrong with government — a collection of third rate scientists who couldn’t make in the real world and are content to feed at the public trough while churning out bogus scientific research. America would be better off without these bloodsuckers, so let’s shut it down and use the money to fund aid to Argentina or tax cuts for those who are already so wealthy they couldn’t spend all their money in a hundred lifetimes. Yeah, that makes sense!
NCAR Must Be Destroyed!
Writing for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on December 19, 2025, Ben Santer said NCAR “is one of the crown jewels of the US scientific enterprise.” Why should we care what Ben Santer says? Because he is a scientist of world renown. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow, and a contributor to all six scientific assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Currently he is a professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia.
According to Russell Vought, the Heritage Foundation nut job who is now the budget director for the senile old man we elected king, “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country. A comprehensive review is underway and any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”
Vought is one of the principal authors of the hate-filled Project 2025, a blueprint for the destruction of the American Experiment that is now being implemented at every level in order to push ordinary Americans down and lift the wealthy up. It should always be remembered that the Heritage Foundation was created and funded primarily by Charles Koch, whose plan to dismantle America has been in the works for nearly six decades.
In his essay, Santer wrote, “NCAR is the birthplace of nearly 60 years of scientific discovery. NCAR scientists built computer models of the individual components of Earth’s climate system. Of the atmosphere and the ocean. Of the land surface and marine biogeochemistry. They coupled those components together in full Earth System Models which capture many critical features of real world climate. They democratized climate science by making their computer models freely available to the global research community.”
No Longer A Democracy
That sounds like pretty important stuff, so why is Vought so determined to destroy NCAR? “In a country that is no longer a democracy, science that does not comport with the leader’s views must be destroyed,” Santer said in his essay. Those of you who studied history in school may recall that period that followed the fall of the Roman Empire as The Dark Ages. Historians today dislike that term, preferring to call it the Early Middle Ages, but regardless of the name we use, it was a time when science and the wide dissemination of knowledge were discouraged by the rulers of the day.
It culminated in the prosecution of Galileo Galilei, who is often credited with being the father of modern science. His heliocentric theory, which placed the sun at the center of the solar system with the planets revolving around it, was deemed to be heresy by the Catholic Church. Today the theory of human activity being responsible for global heating is heresy to Charles Koch and all his fossil fuel acolytes. Santer claimed the plan to crush climate science involves several steps:
By defunding the federal agencies performing critical research. By firing thousands of scientists responsible for the research. By introducing counternarratives to established scientific understanding. By banning words and phrases like “climate change” and “global warming.” By removing educational material from websites.
By installing political operatives to oversee federally funded scientists. By cutting or withholding funding for scientific research at universities. By threatening and punishing individuals and entities that do not bend the knee and bow to the leader’s will. By generating a pervasive climate of fear. A culture of silence and anticipatory obedience.
And by targeting the shining beacons of knowledge—shutting them down or breaking them up into bits and pieces that lack critical mass. Taking over their buildings. Scattering their personnel to the winds.
That is what may happen to NCAR under the second Trump administration. And that is what is already happening to other beacons of US climate science, like the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which was evicted from its building in New York City by the Trump administration in May, and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, which lost federal funding for one of its flagship research programs, the Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System, at the end of June.
Science In America
He argued that, “Scientists are part of the rich heritage and story of the United States. Benjamin Franklin and electricity. Guglielmo Marconi and radio communication. Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, and their discovery of the cosmic background microwave radiation — the echoes of the Big Bang. Susan Solomon and the complex heterogeneous chemistry of stratospheric ozone depletion. Jennifer Doudna and gene editing.
“Like these and many other storied individuals, NCAR is also an important part of the scientific heritage of the United States, along with GISS and GFDL. These institutions were — and still are — leaders in understanding, modeling, and monitoring Earth’s climate. Their scientists are responsible for achievements that all Americans should be justifiably proud of, and that all Americans should value.”
Shutting down NCAR will have knock-on effects that will be harmful to the US, Santer claimed. “If climate science is viewed with disfavor today, other fields of scientific inquiry might be next in line for the chopping block. Vaccine development and deployment systems. Cancer research. Basic science judged to have no immediately obvious economic benefit.
“If the beacons of knowledge are turned off in Boulder, New York, and Princeton, America’s scientific enterprise will suffer for generations. The best and the brightest will leave for more enlightened shores. They will follow their scientific dreams and passions elsewhere. And the best and the brightest from other countries will no longer come to America to study and work.”
The flight of scientific talent away from the US has already begun, France and Canada, among others, have created programs designed to attract those disaffected scientist and bring them to those countries, where they will be free to pursue their research without fear of persecution by Russell Vought and the Moron of Mar-A-Loco.
None of the attacks on science will make America great or healthy again, Santer wrote. “It does not protect US citizens from harm, or provide them with clean air and water. These actions are senseless, vindictive, and cruel. [Emphasis added.] They diminish this country and its standing in the world. They hamstring the science and innovation that fuels much of American prosperity.”
The Importance Of Climate Science
Improving our understanding of how and why Earth’s climate has changed in the past, and how it is likely to change in the future, has real survival value, Santer claimed. Even though this failed administration casts the war on science as a matter of national security, “Such knowledge helps us to better understand the risks of rising seas, warming oceans, stronger hurricanes, and more intense heat waves and floods. Knowledge of our changing climate helps us to better prepare for these risks. To identify the root causes of risks. To reduce climate risks by transitioning to less risky energy systems.”
Santer concluded his essay with this thought, “Let’s do everything we can to keep scientific beacons like NCAR burning brightly. If they go dark, our collective future is darker and more uncertain.” His words evoke those of British foreign secretary Edward Gray who said on the eve of World War I in August, 1914, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
Willful Ignorance
How ironic that willful ignorance and stupidity are once again rampant upon the land at a time when artificial intelligence is all anyone can talk about. AI purports to collect all of human knowledge so people can be perfectly informed and make the best possible decisions, and yet our political leaders ignore that trove of information and act based on their biases and distorted thinking instead.
NCAR is the canary in the coal mine. If it is extinguished, all knowledge will be deemed suspect. That will increase the power of those who wish to control us for their benefit and make the state serve their private interests. That, in turn, will create a new Dark Ages era in the US, in which the lamps of knowledge are extinguished for decades or even generations.
Ignoring science won’t make America great. At a time when China is graduating more engineers each year than there are in all the US currently, policies that prioritize ignorance will only succeed in making America irrelevant and cede leadership to other nations. America will become little more than an afterthought.
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