No, You Liar. You Don’t Care About Science or Clean Air and Water…

In response to the Science March yesterday, Agent Orange issued an entirely unbelievable statement as a response…

President Donald Trump declared his support for the environment and scientific research on his first Earth Day in the White House amid harsh criticisms over his actions to roll back environmental regulations and proposed cuts to non-military spending, including at the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Rigorous science is critical to my administration’s efforts to achieve the twin goals of economic growth and environmental protection,” Trump said in a statement Saturday as thousands of marchers filled the streets of downtown Washington to support science and evidence-based research — a protest partly fueled by opposition to Trump’s threats of budget cuts to agencies funding scientists’ work.

“My administration is committed to advancing scientific research that leads to a better understanding of our environment and of environmental risks,” Trump said. “As we do so, we should remember that rigorous science depends not on ideology, but on a spirit of honest inquiry and robust debate.

“This April 22nd, as we observe Earth Day, I hope that our nation can come together to give thanks for the land we all love and call home,” Trump added.

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How is This Still a Thing? What is Happening?

Didn’t we agree, like, thousands of years ago, that the earth is not flat? So what the hell is happening?

I mean… don’t get me wrong… I know that there are still people who genuinely believe the earth is flat. But they’ve always been… like… fringe of the fringe. Even most know Young-Earth Creationists agree that the earth isn’t flat! Like… if Ken Hamm agrees that the earth is not flat, then maybe… you know… that’s a piece of science we can all agree on, right?

So what the hell is going on? Why is famous person after famous person coming forward to say that they think is the earth is flat?

Even People magazine noticed this…

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Stephen Hawking Has Words for Agent Orange

From LiveScience…

Stephen Hawking does not feel welcome in Donald Trump’s America. The renowned physicist made this unhappy claim in a recent interview, and he expressed particular concern about how the Trump administration is treating the issue of climate change.

Hawking discussed U.S. politics during an interview with ITV’s “Good Morning Britain” on Monday (March 20). Hawking, who once called Trump a “demagogue,” said the new U.S. president was elected by “people who felt disenfranchised by the governing elite in a revolt against globalization.” The Trump administration’s policies pertaining to climate change, and science in general, are an attempt to satisfy that electorate, Hawking told interviewer Piers Morgan.

Well… okay then, Professor Hawking…

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And Here’s 19 Agencies Agent Orange Wants to Completely Cut

From the Washington Post…

President Trump released his much-anticipated budget on Thursday, and the funding cuts are being dissected left and right.

There are 19 federal agencies that have the distinction of facing a 100 percent cut — i.e. extinction. The cuts to these agencies total about $3 billion. They offset about 6 percent of the $54 billion Trump wants to add in military spending.

Below the fold I’ll just list the 19 agencies and link to their homepages. Go to WaPo for more info…

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Scott Pruitt Is a Climate Change Denier… and in Other News, Water is Wet

In perhaps the most Captain Obvious moment on the first week of March, we learn that Scott Pruitt, current head of the Environmental Protection Agency, denies climate change…

From the New York Times…

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on Thursday that carbon dioxide was not a primary contributor to global warming, a statement at odds with the established scientific consensus on climate change.

Asked his views on the role of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas produced by burning fossil fuels, in increasing global warming, Mr. Pruitt said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so, no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”

“But we don’t know that yet,” he added. “We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

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Agent Orange Wants to Slash NOAA Funding by 17%

From the Washington Post…

The Trump administration is seeking to slash the budget of one of the government’s premier climate science agencies by 17 percent, delivering steep cuts to research funding and satellite programs, according to a four-page budget memo obtained by The Washington Post.

The proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would also eliminate funding for a variety of smaller programs, including external research, coastal management, estuary reserves and “coastal resilience,” which seeks to bolster the ability of coastal areas to withstand major storms and rising seas.

NOAA is part of the Commerce Department, which would be hit by an overall 18 percent budget reduction from its current funding level.

The Office of Management and Budget also asked the Commerce Department to provide information about how much it would cost to lay off employees, while saying those employees who do remain with the department should get a 1.9 percent pay increase in January 2018. It requested estimates for terminating leases and government “property disposal.”

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Self Care – What Was the First Life on Earth?

This is a really cool article, written by Stephanie Pappas for LiveScience…

The earliest evidence for life on Earth arises among the oldest rocks still preserved on the planet.

Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, but the oldest rocks still in existence date back to just 4 billion years ago. Not long after that rock record begins, tantalizing evidence of life emerges: A set of filament-like fossils from Australia, reported in the journal Astrobiology in 2013, may be the remains of a microbial mat that might have been extracting energy from sunlight some 3.5 billion years ago. Another contender for world’s oldest life is a set of rocks in Greenland that may hold the fossils of 3.7-billion-year-old colonies of cyanobacteria, which form layered structures called stromatolites.

Some scientists have claimed to see evidence of life in 3.8-billion-year-old rocks from Akilia Island, Greenland. The researchers first reported in 1996 in the journal Nature that isotopes (forms of an element with different numbers of neutrons) in those rocks might indicate ancient metabolic activity by some mystery microbe. Those findings have been hotly debated ever since — as, in fact, have all claims of early life.

Still, the fact that suggestive evidence of life arises right as the rock record begins raises a question, said University of California, Los Angeles, geochemist Elizabeth Bell in a SETI Talk in February 2016: Is the timing a coincidence, or were there earlier forms of life whose remnants disappeared with the planet’s most ancient rocks?

Head on over and read the whole thing! It’s fascinating…

Government Agencies Resist

This is absolutely amazing…

As you know, our Sputum-Filled Orange Julius in Chief has been issuing gag orders and otherwise silencing scientific agencies, especially when it comes to climate change.

And so, in response, multiple alternative resistance accounts have sprung up on Twitter, ready to fight for facts.

This short post is basically just a list of all the alternative Twitters I could find. I want to make this post an official database of all the Alt twitter accounts, so please; if you find any I missed, let me know in the comments so I can update the post. Thank you.

And special thanks to Dana Hunter, at En Tequila Es Verdad, part of The Orbit network, for alerting her readers (myself included) to this…

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Astronomy Picture of the Week – The CMB

*opens door* *dusts off cobwebs*

Time to get this started back up, too. And I’m doing that with this ridiculously amazing image. Now… I absolutely had to start this series off with that incredible image of Saturn, but this honestly should have been the next one. Not making this the very next picture was a mistake. But I’m making up for that now…

This is it right here. The oldest light we can see. The baby visible universe. The best evidence for, and the afterglow of, the Big Bang. The Cosmic Microwave Background.

This image is compiled from data collected by PLANCK. If you click on it, it will download a high resolution, 20.70mb TIFF of this same image. Here’s a link to see WMAP’s image, compiled from nine years of WMAP Data.

The Cosmic Microwave Background, as seen by PLANCK.

The Cosmic Microwave Background, as seen by PLANCK.

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