The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) may be about to return to its traditional role of monitoring atmospheric and oceanic conditions and may no longer include climate change as one of its core functions. According to The New York Times:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is part of the Department of Commerce, operates a constellation of earth-observing satellites. Because of its work on climate science data collection and analysis, it has become one of the most important American agencies for making sense of the warming planet. But that focus may shift, according to a slide presentation at a Department of Commerce meeting by Tim Gallaudet, the acting head of the agency.

In the presentation, which included descriptions of the past and present missions for the agency, the past mission listed three items, starting with “to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans and coasts.” In contrast, for the present mission, the word “climate” was gone, and the first line was replaced with “to observe, understand and predict atmospheric and ocean conditions.”

The presentation also included a new emphasis: “To protect lives and property, empower the economy, and support homeland and national security.”

If the news report is accurate, then it is also in line with the Trump Administration’s outlook on climate change. In addition to NASA, the NOAA is one of the federal agencies that promotes human-caused climate change in which earlier this year, an alert blogger caught the bureaucracy trying to adjust the 2017-2018 Big Freeze out of the official record.

Unfortunately, that was not the first time. One of NOAA’s duties is to preserve one of the world’s major earth surface temperature datasets, the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN). The NOAA has been caught numerous times changing this information so that early 20th century temperatures come out colder and recent temperatures warmer. This being done in order to ensure that they are consistent with man-made climate change studies.

If the NOAA is brought under control, then it will be a good for science since it will be one less agency to worry about falsifying data and can be counted on to culminate honest, accurate scientific evidence.