| Could the torrential flooding that surged the Guadalupe River in Central Texas nearly two dozen feet in several hours, washing away campers as young as 8 years old and killing at least 90 people, been better forecast? And could people who were in harm’s way been better warned? These are all painful, important questions being asked after the Fourth of July flash floods in Kerr County that caught local officials off guard with their intensity and have already become one of the deadliest in the United States in decades. But climate scientists say that extreme weather events like this flood could soon become even harder to track and predict because President Donald Trump wants to effectively end climate science research in the country. His administration dismantled efforts to lower carbon emissions that are rapidly warming the planet and making extreme weather more extreme and more frequent. Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara and co-host of the climate podcast “A Matter of Degrees,” told me earlier this year that this is part of a broader attempt to deny that climate change is real and is affecting everyday lives. But Americans who have experienced extreme floods, fires and hurricanes can connect the dots. “Americans are smart,” she said. “There’s no amount of gutting data that is going to trick Americans into somehow thinking climate change isn’t real.” Here’s what’s going on. Trump’s proposals would effectively end climate research Days before the flood hit Central Texas, Trump sent a budget to Congress that proposes spending $0 on climate research next year. He also wants to end weather research, tornado and severe storm research, and slash much of the budget from the main weather and climate agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Trump administration argues these moves would save money. But the changes would also mean that U.S. scientists could, in essence, lose critical information that helps them understand how a rapidly warming world impacts weather. And that lost information would directly affect the quality of weather forecasts scientists can provide to the public. “What the Trump administration is doing is regressive in every way,” said Daniel Schrag, a climate scientist at Harvard University. “That’s an attack on basic knowledge, on basic day-to-day weather and the knowledge of whether climate change is intensifying this kind of flooding. If I was in Texas, I would want to know. But in the new Trump administration, those questions can’t even be asked.” Schrag listed several massive rainfall events that caught people off-guard recently that he said could be better understood with more climate research: A hurricane in New York City in 2021 that flooded basement apartments, drowning people. Sixty inches of rain that fell in Houston in 2017, a number that Schrag described as “biblical.” Local officials in Kerr County, Texas — a place used to floods — said they never expected the Guadalupe River to rise several feet in several hours. Trump’s budget proposal is just a proposal. Republicans in Congress still have to create their own budget and debate it; Democrats in the Senate can filibuster it. But even if Congress does decide to fund climate research, Trump has also floated the idea of simply not spending money that Congress approves, a legally questionable move called impoundment. Trump has cut weather reporting staff across the country Weather and climate are different but intricately linked, say scientists. Climate is essentially the long-term predictions of what weather will do. And Trump hasn’t waited for Congress to pass a budget to start cutting back on forecasting the weather. His administration has laid off staff in National Weather Service offices across the country, including in the region hit by floods, where one key position for alerting Kerr County was vacant. In other parts of the country, some meteorological offices can no longer monitor weather around-the-clock. The National Weather Service said it sent out a number of warnings to local officials before this flood, warning of the potential for heavy rains and floods days before and sending increasingly urgent alerts as the storm hit. “The National Weather Service did its job despite unprecedented rainfall,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Monday. “ … people were sleeping in the middle of the night when this flood came. That was an act of God. It’s not the administration’s fault that the flood hit when it did.” Still, climate scientists see the cuts to weather reporting and climate research as part of a broader attack on the realities of climate change. The administration and Republicans in Congress have rolled back incentives for electric cars and energy-efficient appliances, ended monitoring of air quality at national parks and are working to weaken rules for highly toxic air pollution and polluting tires. And now they’re setting their focus on ending climate research in America. “Politically, they may not want to support climate change because they don’t believe in it, or they think it’s an annoyance to industry or oil,” Schrag, with Harvard University, said. “But whatever the reason, that he government stops funding climate science? That’s crazy. That’s our government essentially enforcing their own ideology on basic science.” | 
