Thune angling to gut National Weather Service

As the Rapid City area gets pounded again by unusually strong hail-producing summer thunderstorms Senator John Thune wants to kill funding for local National Weather Service forecasting and the earth sciences.

Dan Sobien, president of the NWS Employees Organization, said the bill could be expensive to implement, would endanger the public and put more than 1,000 meteorologists out of work. He questioned whether NWS workers would want to move to another city. “You would lose that local expertise, that local climatic knowledge,” Sobien said. “The fact that somebody in Sioux Falls is issuing the warnings for that area, they know the area. You’re going to lose that if the person issuing that warning is coming from Chicago or Memphis.” [Sioux Falls Argus Leader]

South Dakota's senior senator flip-flopped on climate change:

Notice something different about Sen. John Thune? “Climate change is occurring, it’s always occurring,” Thune said. “There are a number of factors that contribute to that, including human activity. The question is, what are we going to do about it and at what cost?” Thune now clearly comes down on the side of the vast majority of scientists when he acknowledges climate change. He even notes that man does contribute, in some measure, to climate change, and that it is something that lawmakers can affect. [editorial, Aberdeen American News]

Read the Washington Post article linked here.

Nobel Prize winner, Professor Paul Krugman is concerned that Thune and the Republicans want to destroy America.

Our inability to invest doesn’t reflect something wrong with “Washington”; it reflects the destructive ideology that has taken over the Republican Party. The federal government could easily have provided aid to the states to help them spend — in fact, the stimulus bill included such aid, which was one main reason public investment briefly increased. But once the G.O.P. took control of the House, any chance of more money for infrastructure vanished. [Ideology and Investment]

$20 bucks says South Dakota voters won't be seeing John Thune's name in two places on a ballot any time soon.

SEE: May 2015 Global Significant #Climate Events Map from @NOAANCEIclimate #StateOfClimate http://t.co/9AjpNqW2lu pic.twitter.com/cRDRsak9xS

— NOAA (@NOAA) June 18, 2015