The First Rule of Climate Club

Structural features of existence; no love for NCAR; pick your Matt Hubers carefully

Author

Brad Johnson
May 13, 2026

PRESENTED BY JUVENILE TITS

Election update: With nearly all votes in, climate hawk John Cavanaugh is 1000 votes behind Denise Powell in the race for the Democratic nomination for Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional.

“Here’s How Democrats Should Talk About Climate Change,” opines the reliably penetrating Kate Aronoff: “Keeping people safe in a climate-changed world means fighting with Republicans and the monied interests that pay the GOP to defend their interests: a blank check to extract fossil fuels and accumulate wealth indefinitely.”

Democrats are supposed to fight for justice on behalf of workers—that means both economic security for all and also punishing those exploiting and poisoning the rest of us for private gain and dominance.

And climate change is a pervasive, ever-growing symptom of that exploitation, Kate explains:

Whereas virtually every major political issue is on some level affected by the effects of rising temperatures—often dramatically so—“climate” is treated as a niche concern. Political pollsters accordingly survey voters about climate change alongside a slew of other relatively discrete issues. They don’t typically ask them about capitalism, for instance, and for good reason. Capitalism isn’t a traditional political issue so much as the foundation of—conservatively speaking—most issues that voters care about, from inflation to wages to health care costs. Climate change is likewise already shaping everything from housing and insurance markets to migration. That’s because we live in a world where capitalism and climate change are now structural features of existence. In the United States, at least, discussions of structural forces as such tend to be pretty academic.

Kate’s piece happens to be a reply to a tiresome scrap of climate-silence concern trolling by Syracuse political geographer Matthew “Matt” Huber1 in the New York Times opinion pages (originally) headlined “Forget Climate Change. Democrats Need to Talk About Other Issues.”

But the great thing is one only needs to read Kate. Don’t feed the trolls!

lemur

The lame climate Matt Huber doesn’t want people to talk about climate. The cool climate Matt Huber figured out how lemurs got to Madagascar. Credit: Mathias Appel

Surprise, surprise.

“Staffing cuts forced the National Weather Service to cut early morning weather balloon launches,” reports NPR’s Frank Morris. “Then two tornado outbreaks this spring caught forecasters by surprise.”

After a 20 percent staffing cut, the Environmental Protection Agency is publishing 20 percent less research.

going long on climate change by buying future waterfront property on top of a big ass hill

— Frances Meh (@francesmeh.reviews)2026-05-13T14:05:40.884Z

Pressed by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) on microplastics at today’s EPA budget hearing, Zeldin says the EPA plan is to do further research. Zeldin’s proposed budget cuts EPA research by 32 percent, calling for an “an end to unrestrained research grants, woke environmental justice work, radical climate research, and skewed, overly-precautionary modeling that influences regulations.”

When asked by Merkley if the EPA would consider slowing down the expansion of new plastics production, Zeldin straw-manned that it would be too radical to eliminate all plastics.

House GOP appropriators are pushing through a Commerce, Justice, and Science package that eviscerates US science, including a 20% cut to the National Science Foundation, a 14% cut to the NASA Science Mission Directorate, a 14% cut to NIST, and an 11% cut to NOAA’s operations, research, and facilities budget; the latter is due to a cut of $27 million of NOAA climate research, a 16% cut.

The Committee recognizes the critical mission of NOAA and the important contributions of its laboratories and cooperative institutes. The Committee directs NOAA to maintain these capabilities and to avoid closures, consolidations, or eliminations, given their essential role in advancing weather forecasting, atmospheric science, and oceanographic research.

…but not the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Rather, the committee directs the National Science Foundation “to prioritize research that aligns with vital national security priorities, including initiatives to advance AI and quantum computing,” with extended blather about how wonderful and important AI is and what a good idea privatization is.

juvenile long-tailed tits

In other news:

Hearings on the Hill:

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1  Not the Purdue paleoclimatologist Matthew “Matt” Huber, who is an excellent public communicator on climate change from the rising deadliness of heat waves to how lemurs got to Madagascar, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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