Fifth Day of Quandary, 66th of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Electra): Russ Vought, the White House Director of the OMB, announced on Twitter that the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder will be dismantled, calling it "one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country." NCAR was founded more than six decades ago and studies both climate and weather. Vought said any "vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location," although weather and climate cannot be properly understood separately. 

HOSCA points out that Vought, an extreme MAGA Republican, probably a white Christian nationalist and almost certainly an authoritarian, was the chief architect of Project 2025. Back in 2017, as an adviser at OMB during the Stable Genius' first term, Vought wanted to eliminate USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and to fold the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, along with the SNAP food-stamps programs, into a new Department of Welfare, because he thought that name would sound bad. He led Project 2025’s development, including drafting executive orders, regulations, and other plans to more fully empower the president. 

During the 2024 campaign, the Stable Genius repeatedly claimed to have nothing to do with the unpopular Project 2025. His campaign aides criticized the initiative, and news reports suggested that Project 2025 leaders would be blacklisted from working in the White House. However, his administration moved quickly put Vought in charge of the OMB and to fulfill many of Project 2025’s policy objectives. During the government shutdown, the Stable Genius announced that he would meet with Vought to decide which “Democrat agencies” to temporarily or permanently cut, and even referred to Vought as "of Project 2025 fame.”

Climate research and science has long been a target for Vought and the Stable Genius. Earlier this year, they dismissed scientists working on the country's flagship climate report and then removed the report from a government website. They replaced the report with a product produced by the Department of Energy written by hand-picked climate-change deniers 

The Stable Genius' 2026 budget proposes cutting NOAA's budget by about 27% and eliminating the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the agency's core climate and weather research branch. The administration has also rolled back National Science Foundation funding for climate science.

And now they're targeting NCAR. Among other contributions, it developed dropsondes in the 1960s, the tube-shaped instruments released from aircraft to measure temperature, pressure, humidity and wind. In the 1980s, the center helped develop and refine technology to monitor wind shear at airports.

NCAR's Weather Research and Forecasting Model is used around the world to predict everything from thunderstorms to large-scale systems, including hurricanes and frontal systems. Its Community Earth Systems Model is also widely used by scientists for long-range signals on extreme cold-air events,  like the February 2021 event that resulted in sub-zero temperatures for days and the total breakdown of the electrical grid in central Texas. 

But the Stable Genius calls climate change a hoax and has cut funding for climate research, removing climate and weather scientists from their posts across the federal government. He perceives the science as a threat to the bottom-line profit margins of the fossil-fuel industry, which in his anachronistic mind is still the beating heart of the economy. 

In a speech last September to the U.N., he called climate change the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world. "All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong," he claimed. "They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don't get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail."

He's wrong, of course, and he himself is the one who's stupid, profoundly so. HOSCA points out that it's this country that's going to fail if we follow the Stable Genius down his oil-slicked road of budget cuts, science denialism, and subservience to the sooty profits of the petroleum and coal industries.