It's amazing how fast free speech has been destroyed in the past year. Especially when it comes to censorship of science and science's conclusions.
However, I heard many many more people complaining about a lack of free speech in 2023 and 2024 than now. I really wonder what happened to all those principles! It's shocking.
"When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles,"
"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."
The MAGA people, believe it or not, say very similar things about you.
> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then - yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
-- Joseph Goebbels, 1935
Over the summer in the California valley, your computer will scream at you in bright red text it's hot outside. You'll even receive emergency messages on your phone, tv and radio from the government when it reaches triple-digits. There's a joke from someone I can't recall, but the gist is "we used to call it summer...".
Just recently, California declared a state of emergency over a winter storm - a usual/normal occurrence for this time of year as well.
Normal and completely natural weather events are being used to create an environment of alarmism and fear. This is part of why our youth are so convinced the world is going to end $NEXT_YEAR - they've grown up in a world were the government constantly tells them to be afraid of normal, seasonal weather.
There is no national lab producing "alarmism" and calling it that as justification for cutting funding is meant as a justification for restricting free speech and free science.
And that there's some disincentive for wealthy people to go against the current administration's policies?
Look at Bill Gate's philanthropy over the years. There's thousands of others, including all of the Hollywood Celebrities that like to crow about the climate so much.
The NCAR was spending less than $150MM per year - it's not some outrageous amount of money for donors to fund.
That is the government trying to perform censorship.
Sorry, I don't follow. At any rate, you're replying to a post that gave object examples of things that actually happened, and you made not attempt to explain why the things the other person considered unreasonable are actually reasonable.
> calling it that as justification for cutting funding is meant as a justification for restricting free speech
Freedom of speech as a philosophical concept does not entail entitlement to funding, never mind 1A.
Or maybe offer an alternative solution to the Svalbard seed bank? They actually need to pump water from melting ice outside nowadays.
There are severe weather alerts even in red-states that don't believe the climate is changing at all. Because they do notice when people die.
Maybe that's too much "big government" for you tastes - "oh no, they made my phone beep!" - but...
That's not really the same thing as research into knowing what is going on long-term.
That weather kills people.
In Portland, where I used to live, there are more hundred-plus-degree days and heat deaths in the last decade than in the city's entire recorded history. The city has had to open cooling centers for extended periods every summer for vulnerable people, something that was never needed before outside of specific single-year exceptional heat waves.
https://www.oregonlive.com/weather/2017/08/its_not_just_your...
https://www.wweek.com/news/2025/08/25/extreme-heat-claims-th...
Howvmever: it’s definitely the case that climate patterns have shifted. London used to get some snow, most winters. Since about 2015 it’s had almost none. The transitions from one season to the next used to be clear, now they’re vague. Our summers keep hitting higher and higher peaks.
Elsewhere in the UK we’re getting more rain. Flooding is increasingly common, and deeper, in several regions. Each year for the past 5 it seems to get a little worse. I hear insurance prices are changing to reflect it.
So, I think both things are true. There’s some alarmism, and also the climate is changing. The alarm seems justified to me.
Free speech doesn't create an obligation. It's not a binding magic. It's irrelevancy hasn't just happened. It's been a slow death.
The shift to information age and science education did not start until after the Boomers and much of GenX were in and out of school and college. The world for them was cheap and just winging it. Science! Bah! Uncle Rico can still throw them balls over that mountain!
Was warning people 15 years ago the now 80 year olds in charge are nihilistic and not going to change; they will be dead and are just trolling youth about caring. They’re self selecting biology.
Takes $800k/yr to have the buying power $200k/yr had in 1980. The rise in inequality and the global temperature follow a growth pattern that was way too normal to be winging it; what's been allowed economically has been very carefully studied and managed to preserve freedom of agency for the elders. Same as environment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...
Same old stupid political inanity as when I was younger. It still works on a lot of people.
This doesn't really have anything to do with constitutional "free speech". This is a government agency, not the personal research blog of a private citizen.
Government agencies don't have "free speech".
That said, it's a shame this is happening. Maybe a future administration will reopen it.
Future administration?
You can take them up on polymarket.
If I can buy, say, low probability insurance that that will give me a squad of mercenaries and a jet to a bunker somewhere safe, I’d be far more apt to put my money where my mouth is.
It’s not a bad bet. It’s just a dumb bet. The payout doesn’t match the risk.
We’ll see how ICE at select polling places and iffy federal-run voter role purges go in 2026. Should set the tone for how far they try to go in 2028.
India can do it. They had a caste system and yet conduct fair and honest. We can do it too.
It’s not like they didn’t already use both covert and overt means to try to overturn an election, and get caught red-handed on both (I mean, one was televised live, so…) Much cleaner to put in the effort on Election Day itself.
I have 100k NO on trump. it's free money if someone seriously thinks there won't be any "future administration".
of course once there's money at stake they grumble and say there probably will be an election after all <_<
at the end of the day people don't actually believe it, which is why trump is valued little. people who aren't willing to bet with their money on things they say so absolutely aren't serious people.
Either that, or they don’t have money to throw at dumb bets.
There are in fact people who avoid gambling on general principle, unrelated to any one particular thing they're being pressured to bet on.
again, if someone says they know the winning lottery and they don't play, they're unserious. nearly impossible to rig, high payout - outcome is of interest to layperson.
Some possible outcomes (I personally don't believe they are very probable), but...
There is no "call" or inaugurated at all, Trump stays on via some kind of "emergency". The market will fail to resolve to an outcome (based on what it says).
Somehow (via a normal election, or the outcome being decided in the House) one of Trumps sons becomes president.
This, I think, illustrates some of the problems with far out edge cases in prediction markets. Nailing down all of the possible outcomes exactly is hard.
My understanding is that, in many ways, government agencies are more constitutionally protected speech-wise than private entities, precisely because any hierarchical attempt to punish them for their speech would be coming from the government rather than private entities. IANAL (or even American) though so grain of salt.
In any case, a lot of the right-wing hypocrisy around free speech that was being called out by OP didn't have much to do with constitutionally protected freedom of speech either - it was complaining about things like private companies (e.g. Twitter) shadowbanning people.
"The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." U.S. Const., Art. II, Sec. 1, cl. 1.
(There are so-called independent agencies, but the constitutionality of true independence is in question in the Trump v. Slaughter case. You can read about it at https://www.oyez.org/cases/2025/25-332 or https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/12/court-seems-likely-to-sid... or https://reason.com/volokh/2025/12/17/trump-v-slaughter-was-t... or https://reason.com/volokh/2025/12/09/some-answers-to-justice... )
That's government employees.
If an employee of a normal company goes to a bar after work and trash-talks their boss, they can get fired for it.
If an employee of the government does the same, they (probably) can't.
This only covers speech that's not the of the job, and only things that are of "public concern" whatever that means.
Speech is important. Scientific speech more important. A government right now is using its power to selectively defund and wipe out big chunks of scientific research and communications that ultimately exist to protect your future. You should be livid and working to inform people how dangerous this is, not making poor excuses.
Making poor excuses? Don't tell me what to do. If you're so "livid" then you can go hit the pavement for both of us.
Yes. They were motivated by private individuals losing their livelihood, rather than by organizations losing government funding that was not a priori owed to them.
> You should be livid and working to inform people how dangerous this is, not making poor excuses.
Or you could fund it.
This is the significant point. The govt is defunding yet another scientific research institute. To me it seems more productive to get more specific and more substantive from there: How much of the research presently carried out at NCAR will continue? Are there alternative institutes or sources of funding that might save some of it? What are the likely tangible implications? Is the whole place even closing down or just some of it?
Going in the other direction, less specific, more amorphous abstraction about whether or not this is a free speech issue risks derailing the conversation into semantics.
There are interesting questions about wider meaning of free speech than what's protected by the first amendment, but getting moralistic because someone doesn't consider this a free speech issue, while you both agree that it's government defunding a research institute, and that it's bad, seems unnecessarily fractious
Did you interpret the calls for the end of censoring and cancellations that all government agencies must continue to exist forever?
And if so is there any resemblance of logic behind that interpretation?
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised about this at all. If anything, I think it might even be the same cause: because climate change sceptics were being suppressed before Trump.
To be upfront: I'm not American, but it's hard not to notice how the narrative has changed all over the internet.
My personal perspective to the climate crisis has always been a defeatist attitude, I was always in favor of green energy etc, but that's primarily because it would also improve the local area, Air quality etc. from a climate change perspective, it was always pointless, because that's a global issue and cannot be solved by internal regulation in a singular country
What does the number of people that oppose the science have to do with anything in my comment?
People are stopping th research because they don't like the results, and make up lies about it (like calling it "alarmism") in order to censor further results.
They are willing to stop all sorts of basic weather results because of it.
How could I not be aware of the number of people, and what does that have to do with anything? Your comment seems to be operating on some logic that is not explained and that I can not guess.
These are the same people who were "being censored by the media" while going on Fox News to complain about it.
Whining about freedom of speech, or the "demise of Western values", while banning school libraries worth of classic works of western literature for being "subversive".
Their heads would probably explode reading Plato or J.S. Mill.
Fox News literally had a segment on the difference between pedophilia and some other philia whose name I forget.. it was basically saying hey they weren’t 5, they were 14-16! That’s different! Wonder why they’d feel the need to air that viewpoint…
> Well they kind of are, in that the real perps are not them but folks like the Koch family who fund entire think tanks and counter programming to serve their narrow interests.
The Kochs also fund Nova on PBS which has produced and continues to produce a large amount of in-depth scientifically accurate reporting about climate change.
> People as a whole are not experts in every possible area, nor is everyone universally smart
But there are experts and there are smart people who write about what they experts say. Someone doesn't have to be either an expert themself or smart themself to realize that they should try to find what those experts and those smart people think in important areas so they can better choose politicians who will handle policy in those areas correctly.
A heck of a lot of voters put in less effort looking into competing claims of rival Presidential candidates than they do to check out the claims of rival manufacturers when they want to buy an air fryer.
Yes, the politicians that do bad things should be blamed, but I'm also going to blame the people who voted for them if the politicians said they would do those things and even a little research by the voter would have turned up that those things are bad.
And the J.D. Vance nominated judge will say "not guilty!"...
We wouldn't want to become one of those! As long as we never hold leaders accountable I'm sure we'll be safe from that fate.
If you think of any (societal) issue you care about, there's a good chance it would get solved with that tiny change
Not to mention its absence in a president's second term...
The specificity required of legislation to enact such a thing would be ridiculously un-tiny.
But, yes, it should be done, it should exist, it is the right thing to do, it is worth the effort.
A delicate issue I see is how to handle personal matters that the public don't need to know.
Anyhow, you might think that it's hard to know when someone is really lying vs just being uninformed, but in truth in the long term most lies become apparent; while you couldn't prevent every single lie, you'd reduce them enormously, in my opinion; even in countries where the president doesn't lie almost constantly.
Donald Trump is 79. He can only be held accountable in the afterlife, if there is one.
This is a super interesting perspective.. but instead of only looking to the future, could we apply this to the past?
aka Were their predictions about global warming in 2015, 2000, or earlier that drove policy that ended up being incorrect?
I suppose China does not need american scientist to work in China. They just need to make sure they can't work in the US. Which they are doing.
The only "funny" outcome is that they manage to fund a startup that develops tools to alleviate climate change, and explicitly reserve them to countries and states that believed in climate change in the first place.
But that would be mean. So, of course Florida can have it. It will just be slightly expensive for them.
Hope you had a great time on the Cray-1!
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19990422184726/http://www.unixse...
The production of ignorance is booming as its trajectory takes it from roots in advertising, then lobbying, then political campaigns to center stage in political strategy and official government business.
I suspect the academics who study culturally cultivated ignorance will be playing catchup for at least a decade after this administration!
(Assuming they are still around, of course.)
If you know in advance you're going to be downvoted, you're conceding that you're not willing to bother trying to engage in this discussion in the spirit of curious conversation. Bludgeoning people over the head with your points, each prefaced with the word "fact" in all-caps is not curious conversation and is not the intended use of HN.
We want this to be a place where difficult topics can be discussed and heterodox positions can be presented, but that can only happen if people make an effort to be conversational and persuasive rather than belligerent.
FACT: There's a lot that the United States can do to make the situation much worse or better.
FACT: However bad the current situation is, continuing the emissions will keep worsening it.
FACT: Digging in on dying technologies supports the prosperity of our less idiotic adversaries.
FACT: You will be downvoted to oblivion by people who are more aware of what the actual facts are.
There is no appetite for oil alternatives that would stop this from meaning the deaths of hundreds of thousands or more people.
The fact is there is no effective way to power a stable grid with modern renewables. Increasing the energy mix sustainably is great. But if people truly want to divest from oil and coal there number one issue right now should be how to onboard nuclear energy effectively. This has been true for decades at this point, but purist policies on the right and the left have left it completely unrealized or actively dismantled it.
We can debate how much nuclear is needed, but renewables can do a lot, and just hoping that AI will bring nuclear fusion in 5 years is not a great strategy
That's not to say that nuclear power is bad to have, but there's an extremely obvious trajectory here of cheap battery-backed solar everywhere, with few regulatory hurdles and obvious incentives for people to have their own mini solar systems and batteries that take load off the larger grid.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/12/16/trum...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/climate/national-center-f...
America is moving fast towards some sort of fascism, and noone seems to be doing anything about it. So if you are American this is the time for you to rise up and show the rest of the world that there is another America. If you don't noone else will, and things will only get worse.
I'll leave you with a few quotes to get you started on your journey back towards a functional democracy:
"A little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical" - Thomas Jefferson
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they've tried everything else" - Winston Churchill
Elizabeth Willing Powel: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" to Which Benjamin Franklin replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Godspeed. I wish you the very best as a country.
I am not sure but maybe because this lab is a relic of the 50s and the cold war when when both the Soviets and the US were racing to create a weather control weapon...
oceansky•2h ago
data-ottawa•1h ago
Governments should be responsible for preventing these types of externalities as one of their core functions. There is no incentive for markets, consumers, and companies to deal with this, yet the forecast costs of climate change and sea level rise are (and will be) massive. Many places have some weak patchwork framework of private insurance and FEMA style funds, but without an actual pricing and enforcement system there's no way out of the warming feedback loop.
I was extremely disappointed in the failure of my (Canada's) government to articulate what a carbon tax was or how it worked to voters, and that allowed the opposition from both sides to chip at it until now it's a politically toxic idea.
The game theory of international accords is increasingly falling apart and countries will try to undercut each other on carbon pricing.
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995