Grants funded by the National Science Foundation have seen a 40 percent drop in 2017 of applications mentioning the words “climate change”.

If you believe NPR this is a terrible thing.

But no it’s not.

It’s a really, really good thing: one of the first major indicators that the Trump administration is starting to win the climate wars.

NPR reports:

Scientists appear to be self-censoring by omitting the term “climate change” in public grant summaries.

and

The change in language appears to be driven in part by the Trump administration’s open hostility to the topic of climate change. Earlier this year, President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord, and the President’s 2018 budget proposal singled out climate change research programs for elimination. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency has been systematically removing references to climate change from its official website. Both the EPA’s leader, Scott Pruitt, and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry have said they do not accept the scientific consensus that humans are causing the planet to get warmer.

Yep. The only bit NPR gets wrong is the mournful slant it has imposed on this happy-making story. Sure it’s bad news if you’re a second-rate hack – as so many climate scientists are – and the only way you’ve mentioned to turn your worthless environmental science/ecology/marine biology/whatever degree into paydirt is by tagging the all-important phrase “climate change” onto your research grant application.

But for the poor saps who have to fund this bogus research – ie: everyone else – it’s like a mugger in Central Park suddenly apologizing and handing your wallet and iPhone back.

Republicans – President Trump especially – are often accused by leftists of being “anti-science”.

Actually, though, the only science they’re against is the politicized #fake science promoted by people like Lysenko in the Soviet era and by climate alarmists like Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann and James Hansen.

Most taxpayers not unreasonably believe that if their money is going to be confiscated from them by the government and funnelled into the science industry then the very least they should expect in return is that it goes towards research that is in some way important to the nation or beneficial to mankind or useful to the economy.

“Climate change” research, it is becoming increasingly obvious, fits none of those criteria.

It’s a fit subject for scientific study in much the same way, say, the breeding habits of Komodo dragons or the crystalline patterns of snowflakes or the chemical composition of Uranus are fit for scientific study: quite interesting, if you’re into that kind of thing. But definitely not a field you’d ever want to become so powerful it became the go-to area for any aspiring researcher, sucking attention, expertise and money from any number of potentially more useful areas.

Obviously if you asked any climate scientist to assess the merits of that previous paragraph, he would disagree quite violently.

But as Upton Sinclair famously said:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

The sooner some of these environmental science graduates are where they belong – asking us whether we want a regular or large fries to go with that; drawing intricate patterns on the froth of our lattes or racing to get our pizzas to us before the deadline – the sooner that grant money can go back to be spent on useful stuff like curing cancer, wiping out malaria and perfecting all those personalized jet packs we were promised as kids but seem to have been a remarkably long time coming.