Your right, we can’t expect the government to do everything so we need to get our spending priorities straight. This is something we keep. That megadeath super-maser dead-end perpetual defense program can be cut because we all know nothing is going to come out of it.The 10 mil for a Pakistani Sesame Street or the 60 grand for a wine conference in Ohio, or the 606 grand study of online dating. That is bullshit we need to cut out. There is at least 7 billion of that sort of smut in the current budget so if we need to redirect about 1 billion total (and that is REALLY a high end estimate) of that money to split between the USGS to maintain nbii, the US forest service to clean up the disgusting state of the Great lakes, and to the NOAA so they can provide legitimate researchers with up to date, accurate climate data, that is still a 6 billion dollar savings PER YEAR. With perhaps 2 exceptions to REPUBLICAN (and obviously I’m a pretty liberal leaning individual here) Senator Tom Coburn’s wastebook, I can say I agree with pretty much everything he says in there so I am all about making cuts and sacrifices.

That 6 billion is before any medicare/medicaid reforms like those suggested by Senators Joe Lieberman and Tom Coburn (again) and social security security reforms like those proposed by Jason Chaffetz which should save the government 500 billion and 600 billion dollars over the next 10 years respectively (which actually would make these programs ALMOST sustainable). What we can’t sacrifice is the very few remaining science projects at the FEDERAL level, not state and city pet projects, federal level projects. At some point we have to protect the sciences, because science and technology are the only thing this country has going for it in the future.

This proposal, which I am honestly kind of neutral on, proposes setting up a formal, funded program within the agency.

My problem is that based on my experience with government agencies, establishing a program is a great way to start a prepetually funded, growing expense item. This I think we should be careful of. Especially at the expense of the true science NOAA should be doing.

I haven’t made my personal conclusion on this thing yet. I need more facts to do so.

Also, not every idea our agencies propose to Congress is a good idea to fund — even if the idea has merit. We simply can’t do everything.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find that NOAA sacrificed something once justified as important for their science endeavors in order to fund this. I say this based on working with government agencies in the past.

And don’t forget NOAA for quite some time resisted in sharing their data and calculations (corrections applied to the raw data to compensate for many placement and localized weather station issues). They play games.

And before anyone calls me some GOP shill, I’m a Democrat and voted for Obama. But that doesn’t mean I’m not weary of the waste and personal ambition driven power and funding corruption in our agencies.

I read 30+ sites dedicated to green energy, renewable technology, climate change, and other topics. I would appreciate if reporting like this and other articles on this site didn’t focus on calling out the GOP as I know for a fact that both sides have Green lovers and haters.

A lot of greedy fools will deny climate change (at least the human perpetuated kind) but I doubt too many sane ‘non-trolling’ people support denying the freedom of speech.

Even if Noschitt (classy name btw, smells troll-ey) is serious it is sort of hypocritical no?
Let trolls be trolls.