The New Yorker:

As the death toll climbs in Texas, the Trump Administration is actively undermining the nation’s ability to predict—and to deal with—climate-related disasters.

By Elizabeth Kolbert

Tropical Storm Barry developed in the Gulf of Mexico, as this magazine still calls it, on the morning of June 29th. It was the second named storm of the season and, as such, it arrived unusually early; historically, tempests with names like Bonnie or Bob didn’t form until mid-July. Later that day, Barry made landfall near the city of Tampico, on Mexico’s east coast, and weakened to a tropical depression. Its brief life span made it the butt of weather-related jokes: “Blink and you missed it,” a pair of meteorologists wrote. But, it turned out, Barry was far from finished. Its remnants continued to wend their way north, carrying with them moisture from the Gulf. This moisture helped supercharge the rains that fell in and around Kerr County, Texas, in the early hours of July 4th, causing the floods along the Guadalupe River that killed at least a hundred and twenty people.

While Barry was making its way toward Texas, the White House was plotting destruction of its own. The Trump Administration has made no secret of its disdain for science, and on June 30th it recommended cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from projects aimed at improving climate and weather predictions. Among the many research centers the Administration wants to shutter are the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the National Severe Storms Laboratory, and the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations. The last two of these are based in Oklahoma; all are funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is part of the Commerce Department. “I cannot emphasize enough how disastrous closing the National Severe Storms Laboratory and CIWRO would be—for ALL of us,” Stephen Nehrenz, a meteorologist with the CBS affiliate in Tulsa, posted on X after the budget proposal was released.

Go to link