CU’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Has a Plan to Avoid Trump Admin’s Ire

A beacon to the scientific prowess of the city of Boulder, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Mesa Laboratory proudly overlooks town from its perch beneath the Flatirons. Though it may appear to be just another one of I.M. Pei’s Minecraft bases scattered across the world, the Boulder NCAR lab is one of the largest climate science labs in the country and provides vital research that facilitates everything from safe air travel to everyday weather forecasting. As a federally funded institution staffed by as many as 830 employees, most of whom are based in Boulder but have ties to universities and research institutes across the country, NCAR is central to both the field of climate science and the national economy.

But, with recent promises from the Trump administration to dismantle NCAR, this blocky fixture of the skyline has come under threat. One man’s climate science is another’s “climate alarmism,” a term seriously employed by Russel Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, in an attempt to justify the destruction of the lab to save a few federal government’s pennies.

CU Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences took the hints and seems to have set about self-preservation. Seeing one of its most important partners and a bastion within its field gutted, the department has offered little protest. There has even been a dramatic shift in the trajectory of the department’s publishing.

Leaked to the Jump by a fed-up grad student, a new research paper appears to have been upended with a highly ideological discussion during peer-review. Where the results demonstrated that Boulder would likely never again experience a “White Christmas” and that we are all going to die, this discussion claimed that “this is no cause for fear” and that “nothing at all is wrong with the climate.” It went on to argue that a “White Christmas” doesn’t have to refer to the presence of snow but instead the traditional spirit of Christmas. Any place that upholds Western, “Judeo-Christian” values and takes great care to “preserve agreeable demographics to the continuation of the white race” will continue to experience White Christmas whether or not CU is running air conditioning in empty buildings during the holiday.

Climate science journals may be looking for this kind of work now to stay afloat, the university might be encouraging its researchers to produce certain kinds of work, or researchers themselves might be trying to get ahead of the game and produce research that doesn’t trigger any “climate alarmism” alarm bells in any offices of budget management. 

Whatever the case, we may have to get used to closely reading research procedures and understanding nonsensical graphs in order to glean information out of new papers, as it appears the tried and true tactic of going straight for the conclusions is also what government censors may be doing. Researchers may be able to get away with obscuring their results behind bias-affirming conclusions for now, but this tactic may not work for long. 

Meanwhile, in the Women and Gender Studies department, similar advancements are being made in hopes of keeping funding. One source has notified us that some faculty are working on a book called The White Man’s Burden: The Case for Reparations.