What’s the proper response to this?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
14 Comments
A completely dumb idea: Some organization should launch a fantasy football-type game with geography. You pick a collection of places around the country or the world that have to be self-sustaining as a group, and follow the weather’s economic impact on them for a year. Drought, mudslides, forest fire, snow, heat waves, flooding, you name it. New records are like injuries.
Oh, and Occupy Wall Street could use a visit from Al Gore.
What are the substantive differences between weather and climate? If their mission already essentially includes climate and they don’t need more funding (as they claim) then just fold it into the NWS.
If they do need more funding to handle the onslaught of requests they claim, then be honest about the need for more arms and legs to do that.
The name of the agency has little to do with the actual mission and in this case being honest about the climate component of their mission would seem to make it harder not easier to accomplish the mission.
Call it the Agency for FEMA Risk Reduction and say that niggers in LA will need less hurricane relief aid if that helps the work get done.
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."hmmm…they asked for no new funding, in the establishment of this office?
OK…run it for a year and show what you can do with this office. Personally, I could see this idea better realized as a sub-division of the NWS, but that’s me..
the main thing is to put together a team dedicated to data-gathering and classification for climate issues as opposed to part-timing it in the course of doing NWS duties…I can understand reasoning for this at least.
The mistake of all mistakes was in asking Congress before establishing the division and running it for a year–they gave the Conservatard Deniers the chance to kill it in the cradle…so of course they’d oblige.
Personally, I think the members of Congress could use a good horsewhipping, but that’s just me.
how about an executive order for starters.
what’s not to like, other than the fact that it’s an easy answer.
frankly, it seems tailor made for one as it doesn’t require any additional funding, and it streamlines the operations of the agency leading to a more effective government. additionally, it would place the prez on the side of science as opposed to the flat earth society that the repubs have become.
oh wait, that would be partisan, and we can’t have any of that with an election on the horizon…got to keep the 27% of the population that are troglodytes in the game…who knows, they might be the great unwashed undecided voting bloc and could be crucial to winning the election. </snark>
as ag is wont to say…nevermind.
this is who they are. no shock here.
I would issue an exec order any get the military to supply the needed man power. They need the weather/climate info as much as the farmers.
Heavy drinking.
The proper response is to assign the responsibility to an existing department and keep it moving – eff ’em.
Clearly it’s Obama’s fault. Durr.
Clearly it is. He didn’t pre-emptively capitulate to the oil companies and privatize NOAA.
So the Congress had to do it themselves. Or at least one part of Congress.
See how the narrative is preserved.
re-education camps?
Acknowledgement that we no longer have a Congress that is dealing with reality. That should be the response.
And then anger that so much oil money is flowing into Congress that they can buy such a suicidal result.