Shitstain Cuts Climate Research $$ To Princeton Because Climate Science Might Make Young People Anxious

[hatrack]

The Trump administration announced it is cutting nearly $4 million in federal funding for climate change research at Princeton University, saying that the work promoted “exaggerated and implausible climate threats” and increased “climate anxiety” among young Americans.

The cuts to programs that study topics like sea-level rise and coastal flooding were announced Tuesday by the Commerce Department, which houses the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s premier climate science agencies. They come after federal agencies including NASA and the Energy Department announced last week that they would pause dozens of research grants at Princeton. NOAA currently spends roughly $220 million per year funding climate research, but the Trump administration has signaled that it intends to pare back those efforts.

Among the latest cuts was funding for the Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System, a collaboration between NOAA and Princeton that focuses on improving computer models that show how the ocean and atmosphere are changing. One of the program’s meteorologists, Syukuro Manabe, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2021 for his work on modeling Earth’s climate and predicting the effects of global warming.

In pulling funding for the program, the Commerce Department said that the collaboration “promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.” The agency also said it would stop funding the program’s educational initiatives targeted at students in kindergarten through high school students. The Commerce Department also said it would stop funding a five-year research effort at Princeton to understand how Earth’s water availability would fluctuate as a result of global warming. And the agency said it would pull funding for a different five-year research project aimed at predicting how changes in rainfall patterns and sea-level rise could affect coastal flooding.

EDIT

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/climate/trump-noaa-princeton-climate-research.html

[SheltieLover]

1. As if they care about anyone's anxiety level!

[Irish_Dem]

2. Anxiety is the correct response to impending catastrophe.

We need people to start facing reality and get anxious.
Maybe they will do something.

[NNadir]

3. Princeton is a rather odd place for climate science.

They are the University overseeing PPPL, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a National Laboratory dedicated largely to the idea that fusion energy will save the world.

It's a little late for fusion to save the world.

That lab played a role in my son's scientific development through the public outreach of the Science on Saturday series held each winter.

As he's in nuclear materials, as far as fission vs. fusion, he can get a job, but fusion has a materials science problem that strikes me as nearly insurmountable.

Frankly, though, overall, if one hangs out around the Andlinger Center and attends events there, one can learn how otherwise antinuclear the general tenor is there, with respect to fission, which is also too late to save the world although in a rational setting it wouldn't have been.

From what I can tell, almost nothing has been done to reverse the folly. It's all chanting along the lines of "renewable energy will save us," although it didn't save us, isn't saving us and clearly won't save us.

There are decidedly brilliant people at Princeton, but to my mind there is a profoundly weak psychology to the place. They felt a need to demonize the best available option, fission, to advance funding for the merely speculative, fusion.

As for so called "renewable energy," clearly all it has done at vast expense is to entrench the use of fossil fuels.