President vows not to let meteorology affect the weather.
As he did with the CDC, President Donald J. Trump today removed what he called the “mess of scientific propaganda" from the National Weather Service,” insisting that all their data be filtered through the White House for assessment before being released to the public.
"They take all this data and they editorialize all day long," Trump said. "That has to stop."
Later, an NWS spokesman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he might want to feed his family, claimed that what Trump called editorializing was actually forecasting. "We get input and make predictions," the forecaster said. "That's why it's a called a forecast and not a retrospective."
Trump does not see it that way.
“Too much mumbo-jumbo,” he said. “And too much testing. You have a windy day and some roofs come off and all these scientists want to do is test, test, test: was it straight-line wind? rotating wind? updraft? downspout? They got so may terms for wind. Then even they got something called a Fajita scale for tornadoes. I’ve seen Fajitas and I’ve seen the Wizard of Oz. Fajitas don’t look anything like a tornado. From now on we won't let science dictate the weather anymore. If your house blew down, instead of blaming it on climate change, call the damn insurance agent.
(editor's note; the Fujita scale is used to measure the power of a tornado. A downspout is...well...a downspout. Fajita are delicious)
Trump continued his attack when it came to hurricanes.
"You give them names, they become important," he said. "You make it worse by giving them categories: Category 1, Category 4, Some of these guys want a Category 6. Enough with the cyclones and tycoons," he said miming the act of walking into the wind, though the effect was lost when his hair didn't move. He then lit into "these weather artists" who print the forecasting maps.
"I fixed one of those hurricane charts a while back, saved the lives of everyone in Alabama, and what happened? All weathermen got mad. They don't want it known that anyone with a Sharpie can do that stuff."
(editor's note: it's typhoons, and nobody likes a mime)
One reporter asked about the seeming increase in hurricanes, the number and intensity.
"It's testing," he said. "We test more so we have more hurricanes. I mean we see trees bent in half or a telephone pole stuck in a nuclear cooling tower and right away we have to test—oh, gee, is it a hurricane? From now on the answer is no. It's not a hurricane. Go back to sleep. Or go out for breakfast. To a restaurant. Get the economy going and next winter people will shake each other’s hands and say 'hey we had a season with no hurricanes! I guess global warming is a hoax after all.'"
Trump compared this new action to his treatment of the pandemic
"As soon as I started ignoring it," he said. "It disappeared." Here he fluttered his fingers in the air to mimic a virus disappearing—or maybe a person losing his mind. "It disappeared," he repeated, "and people went shopping, got tattoos, bought plane tickets, went to the movies, kissed strangers, grabbed women...consensually.
He bristled when someone mentioned Dr. Anthony Fauci's warning about another 100,000 deaths.
"That guy—he keeps saying we’re all gonna die, but look at the good place we're in now with just a few hot spots in 42 states. The other six are doing well. It's like with the weather—we don't need some organization from the swamp taking data and turning it into fake news—that’s Kayleigh McEnany’s job.
(editor's note—the other eight.)
Trump then turned things over to Ms. McEnany who, reading from some textbook, explained how Cape values can be used to predict thunderstorm severity and how steeper lapse rates can mean troublesome weather. But when someone asked her why the barometer was low that day, she said it had probably fallen off the wall.
There were no further questions.
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