From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter

They say you can hear the wailing from space—or at least from deep within the editorial dungeon of The Guardian, where climate correspondents are reportedly being consoled with soy lattes and participation trophies after the unthinkable occurred: the Trump administration canceled funding for ICF International, the contractor coordinating America’s National Climate Assessment (NCA). That’s right—the federal sugar spigot has been shut off, and the climate clergy are not taking it well.

Let’s start with a gem from The Guardian’s April 9th obituary for the ICF’s federal funding:

“There’s really no coming back from this,” moaned one anonymous staffer, whose main contribution to planetary salvation apparently consisted of convening meetings and photocopying catastrophic graphs. “I’m left without a support system and the latest science on climate change”​.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/trump-national-climate-assessment-usgcrf

Good heavens. Without a publicly funded bureaucracy to remind them that hot weather in August is now “unprecedented,” how will America survive?

But fear not, dear reader, for this is not the death of science—it’s the euthanasia of a political machine disguised as one.

The NCA: Where Science Goes to Be Molded Like Play-Doh

According to the Breakthrough Institute, the NCA, in its current state, is less an objective scientific document and more “a political tool” riddled with alarmist framing and selective citation​. It is, to borrow their phrase, “far less useful than its potential.” Kind of like a $10,000 espresso machine at a climate summit—impressive, expensive, and mostly producing froth.

The report is infamous for its headline-friendly key messages like “Systemic Racism and Discrimination Exacerbate Climate Impacts on Human Health.” Because nothing says peer-reviewed science like intersectionality word salads​.

Breakthrough’s critique reads like a full autopsy: lack of systematic review, heavy bias toward worst-case scenarios, and reliance on cherry-picked data. The NCA isn’t informing policy—it’s auditioning for a spot on MSNBC.

The Real Tragedy? No More Government-Paid Fiction Writers

One “federal climate expert” (anonymous, of course) bemoaned that firing ICF staff “guts the entire climate research and services ecosystem”​. Translation: a few dozen Beltway bureaucrats lost their raison d’être—and, more importantly, their federal per diems. Another lamented that the sixth National Climate Assessment is now “effectively destroyed.” Cue dramatic string music and shots of melting glaciers.

Meanwhile, back in the world of actual evidence, the Fifth NCA was already shredded by independent analysis. Larry Hamlin here at WUWT exposed the report’s sleight-of-hand, such as combining data from geographically disparate regions (like Alaska and Hawaii) with the continental U.S. to fabricate an alarming warming trend​. Real NOAA data—stripped of manipulative region-stacking—shows no significant temperature anomaly increase in the U.S. since the 1930s. In other words, the “hottest ever” narrative evaporates under scrutiny, like a snowflake in Phoenix.

The Real Inconvenient Truth: This Was Never About Science

If the NCA were a scientific document, its elimination would be met with a sober discussion about methodology. Instead, we get Michael Mann, the godfather of hockey-stick hysteria, declaring that ending ICF’s contract is:

“A crime against the planet – arguably, the most profound of all crimes”​.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/trump-national-climate-assessment-usgcrf

Calm down, Michael. Genocide, war, and famine would like a word. This isn’t a crime—it’s budget discipline.

Let’s face it: the NCA and its incestuous network of climate “experts” have long functioned as an echo chamber for worst-case modeling, doomsday predictions, and lucrative consulting gigs. Scrapping it isn’t the apocalypse—it’s spring cleaning.

Don’t Cry for ICF, Argentina

The cancellation of ICF’s contract doesn’t signal the end of climate science. It signals the end of publicly funded ideological propaganda masquerading as science. It’s a budgetary course correction, a rebalancing of priorities, and a much-needed cold splash of reality.

And judging by the caterwauling from The Guardian, it hit exactly where it should.

Keep your tissues handy, climate clerics. The gravy train has left the station—and it’s coal-powered.