TRUMP VS THE ENVIRONMENT

About that Ukraine-Russia War, and the meeting in Saudi Arabia about a ceasefire:

Ukraine welcomes this proposal. We see it as a positive step, and we are ready to take it," Zelenskyy said. "The United States must now persuade Russia to do the same. If Russia agrees, silence will take effect immediately."

So what's happening in the Gaza Strip these days?

• Israel has for 11 days now blockaded the region with no food, fuel or medicine allowed to cross into the territory.
• Deadly Israeli attacks continue.
• There is a new round of negotiations in Qatar.
• Latest info has 61,700 dead Palestinians.
• What about Trump's plans to convert the Strip into a tourist resort?  No one in the Middle East likes it.
• 
  Six days ago on March 4, only a few days after the end of the first phase ceasefire, a Palestine Summit was held.
• Involved Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, rejecting Trump's plan, but demanded an end to all forms of violence and a return to peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians.
• Egypt advanced a plan for peace.  Read it.  Appears to be well-supported, for it was adopted by this summit.

Be prepared for the U.S. government to shut down Friday night.  The House passed a stopgap budget, but the Senate has different rules.  Republicans need 60 votes to even get to that vote.  As you know, there are 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats in the Senate.  Said Minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York):

“Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort, but Republicans chose a partisan path drafting their continuing resolution without any input, any input, from congressional Democrats,” Schumer said during a brief floor speech. “Because of that, Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House CR.”

Should you be worried?  Nah, happens all the time.

Egg prices in the USA are now dropping.

• Of course, Democrats blamed Trump for the jump in prices, from $2/dozen to $8....and I paid $15/18 eggs in Hawaii 10 days ago.
• Of course the real reason had nothing to do with Trump's policies, for the cause was a bird flu outbreak, where 111 million mostly egg-laying hens were culled, starting from 2022 into January of this year.

So on to the topic of today, Americans are concerned about global warming.   From Gallup.  Pew too.

From EOS Science News:

Trump Boasts About Dismantling Environmental and Science Policy

Trump told House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to “get rid” of the CHIPS and Science Act, a law passed with bipartisan support that set spending goals for federal research agencies. The CHIPS Act, which initially stood for “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors” for America, focuses on increasing the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workforce, improving rural STEM education, and providing support for research regarding national security, artificial intelligence, manufacturing, climate change, and critical minerals.

President Donald Trump, on day one of his second term, not only took revenge on many of his opponents, but also too on science.  According to his niece, Mary Trump:

When asked if the President was known among family members as someone who didn’t tell the truth, Mary Trump asserted that he “does on some levels know what he’s doing” and pointed to issues such as not wearing a mask. She said her uncle is not anti-science but will ignore facts in order to spin his preferred narrative.

From E&E News by Politico:

Trump's next climate move:  Show Global Warming Benefits Humanity

• Trump has long rejected climate science.
• The claims would be highly misleading and ignore decades of scientific research that shows climate change will have increasingly dire effects. 
• ...a federal report downplaying or denying the threat of climate change would become a cornerstone of Trump’s efforts to end or weaken climate regulations while expanding executive authority. It also would mark an escalation of Trump’s own climate disinformation from rhetoric to federal action.
• In its first weeks, the Trump administration fired climate scientists and removed climate-related government web pages while Cabinet officials made false climate claims.
• When EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin recommended in February that the White House attempt to reverse the endangerment finding — which requires EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions — he may have kick-started a process to produce a government report intended to tear down climate rules.
• 
  
  What the Trump administration is trying to do amounts to nothing more than trying to pollute the process with ideologically-motivated antiscience,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in an email. “It means that the U.S. federal government is now at war with humanity.”
• In response:

“There was a ton of scientific evidence supporting the conclusion that greenhouse gasses worsened climate change. There’s now 10 times that evidence,” Michael Gerrard of Columbia University said. “It’s implausible that EPA could now come up with evidence refuting any of that and so it would be the essence of arbitrary and capricious.”

• Maybe this is one related reason why Columbia University saw cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts.
• Another 60 universities subsequently got notices for the same reason, which had to do with antisemitic harrassment.  

• 
  Hawaii governor, Josh Green, went to DC to protest the confirmation of RFK Jr, so maybe this too is related to being selected.  
• Well, maybe not, because Green, who is Jewish, today reported that he talked to the White House, and said the University of Hawaii is not on the chopping block.
• 
  However, remember Maine Governor Janet Mills, who locked horns with President Trump on education and transgender rights?  He was pissed, and today punished the University of Maine System for their refusal to ban trans athletes from participating in women's sports.  He had the Department of Agriculture freeze millions of research dollars to Maine.

But then, just yesterday, Trump sought to eliminate the greenhouse gas observatory in Hawaii.  So I fear that Hawaii is especially vulnerable to Trump revenge, for not only does he punish those involved with global climate change research, he also knows that Hawaii was the state that most voted for Kamala Harris.

• 
  The observatory, established in 1956 on the northern flank of the Mauna Loa volcano, is recognized as the birthplace of global carbon dioxide monitoring and maintains the world’s longest record of measurements of atmospheric CO2.
• 
  Charles Keeling established the program in 1958, creating the famed Keeling Curve, showing the upward trajectory of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.  The zig-zags refelect the seasonal cycle of plant growth and decay.  CO2 levels drop during the growing season.

Indicated French newspaper Le Monde:

In the US, the Trump administration is 'sabotaging' climate science

Nature (from the UK) magazine (with Science from the U.S., these two journals represent the top two science publications) reported:

Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere:

US President Donald Trump is taking a wrecking ball to science and to international institutions. The global research community must take a stand against these attacks.

• Federal agencies and universities are in turmoil. Thousands of researchers are in limbo as they wait for a thaw on a highly questionable funding freeze. And around the world, millions of grant recipients of US assistance programmes have been abandoned.
• Trump has also cancelled US federal funding for international climate-change projects, which totalled some US$11 billion in 2024, amounting to around 10% of annual global public climate finance. Alongside his decision to withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, this is a severe blow to tackling climate change, and will delay efforts to boost finance for the countries most affected by global warming.
• NASA closed its chief-scientist office, along with 2 other offices, firing 23 employees.
• 
  You've read, of course, Trump's war on public health and environmental regulations.
• NOAA last week fired up to 900 employees.  The agency is responsible for monitoring weather.
• The Department of Education will cut nearly 50% of its workforce, on the way to total elimination through the U.S. Congress.
• The Environmental Protection Agency will cut 65% of its staff.
• According to The New Yorker, Trump's Agenda is Undermining American Science.

The United States, for much of its history, was less an engine of scientific progress than a beneficiary of it. Pasteur, Koch, Lister, Mendel, Curie, Fleming—the giants who midwifed modern medicine were not Americans but Europeans. During the Second World War, the balance shifted. President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Scientific Research and Development and tapped Vannevar Bush, a former dean of M.I.T., to lead it. In the span of a few years, the agency spurred development of an antimalarial drug, a flu vaccine, techniques to produce penicillin at scale, and, less salubriously, the atomic bomb. Bush became a champion of state-sponsored research, helping to establish the National Science Foundation and to modernize the National Institutes of Health. As he wrote, “Without scientific progress, no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation.”

Bush’s vision may be as responsible as any other for nearly a century of American scientific dominance. Research funded by the federal government has found useful expression in many of the defining technologies of our time: the internet, A.I., crispr, Ozempic, and the mRNA vaccines that saved untold lives during the covid pandemic. Between 2010 and 2019, more than three hundred and fifty drugs were approved in the U.S., and virtually all of them could trace their roots to the N.I.H. The agency has grown into the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, with a forty-eight-billion-dollar budget, supporting the work of tens of thousands of scientists. By some estimates, each dollar that the U.S. invests generates five dollars in social gains like economic growth and higher standards of living.

• 
  Sure Democracy is crumbling, and yes, Global Warming will now more than ever be left unchecked.  There are solutions to neutralizing Trump, but the truly effective ones are illegal.  All the above would not have happened if Thomas Matthew Crooks' bullet was one inch more accurate.

I close with a gargantuan prime number, the title of an article last month in Scientific American.

•   2136,279,841 – 1 is the largest known prime number.  Watch this video.
• 1 has one digit, 10 has two and 100 has three.
• 
  This just discovered prime number has 41,024,320 digits.
• The estimated number of atoms in the observable universe only has around 80 digits.
• What is a prime number?  If you're really interested, click on that link.

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