US President Donald Trump has launched an unprecedented assault on environmental and climate initiatives. This includes cuts to US scientific agencies that, if enacted, would hurt other nations’ abilities to accurately forecast the weather, warn scientists and the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Trump’s second term has begun with a dizzying array of executive orders, directives, firings and policy changes, with the environment firmly in the president’s sights. One of his first acts was to start withdrawing the US from the Paris Agreement, the international climate pact, for the second time. But Trump has also targeted scientific research in sweeping government job cuts at federal agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), whose research work and data is invaluable to the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and weather forecasting agencies around the world. This is a chaotic time for NOAA, one of the world’s ...
