To Keep Climate Science Alive, Researchers Are Speaking in Code

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Originally published at: To Keep Climate Science Alive, Researchers Are Speaking in Code - TPM – Talking Points Memo

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. At the Department of Agriculture’s research division, everyone knows there’s one word they should never say, according to Ethan Roberts. “The forbidden C-word” — climate. Roberts, union president at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Illinois, has worked…

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This isn’t just climate science, across the government agencies anything science related that doesn’t hew to what conservatives want is being cut. Science funding in general is taking a beating, and that’s even with Congress indicating that the administration should continue fund science. The Trump administration has been withholding grant payments and not evaluating proposals or granting awards. It’s all meant to undermine science in general, as if removing science research would change what the scientists in other nations can study and find.

In one year a huge amount of damage has been done, and I suspect that by the time that Trump leaves office the US will no longer be a leader in any science field where it doesn’t have a unique technology that allows it to outpace other nations. We’re going to lose students and postdocs that will never come here, and students and postdocs and senior researchers who are here but feel forced to leave and do science in their home nations. US scientists aren’t immune to this either, if we can’t get funding then we’ll go to nations that will pay us, and some of us are married to immigrants and may be forced out of the nation to stay with them.

There’s no good reason for any of this either, just whatever conservatives that decided science was against their (probably religious) beliefs and had to be destroyed.

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War is peace.

freedom is slavery.

this is a very slippery slope

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The government restricting words that may be use is directly against the first Amendment. Government cannot regulate speech

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darrtown

The government restricting words that may be use is directly against the first Amendment. Government cannot regulate speech

They can’t until they do, and then they can and will until someone forces them not to.

One of the advantages of acting like a dictatorship, or a wanna-be one.

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What a bunch of first graders. The trumpites, I mean. Like when you heard “Jesus rode into town on an ass” and giggled.

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Unfortunately, much of the research being conducted during this period will be lost or un-reliable. So much of science and engineering rely on very precise, well defined and un-equivocal terminology. In my work, although similar, a digital terrain model (DTM) is not the same as a digital elevation model (DEM) or a digital surface model (DSM). I spent a lot of time educating clients and new hires that these terms cannot be used interchangeably.

Also, database searches for key words may well overlook valuable research that uses alternate wording/phrasing for what is being searched.

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