The Trump Administration has cut much of the funding for the National Weather Service, which is now launching only about half as many weather balloons each morning as it used to. The result, meteorologists say, has been a degradation in our ability to forecast severe weather—late last month in Boulder, as smoke from the wildfire that killed three firefighters on the Colorado-Utah border hung in the air, I spoke with Daniel Swain, one of the country’s foremost researchers on the effects of climate change. “There have been essentially no weather-balloon launches in the interior West some days,” he said. “And we see efforts to completely dismantle oceanic monitoring systems, as a potentially historic El Niño emerges in the Pacific. We see the scrapping of climate-monitoring satellites before