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Despite the conservative naysayers, the federal government is heavily invested in climate research. Take the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab (GFDL) in Princeton, NJ. This is a NOAA facility involved with sophisticated climate models. Raytheon, a major defense contractor, is involved in day-to-day operations.
Typically, climate models require the resources of high-performance computing facilities with thousands of processors. These facilities cost tens of millions of dollars to implement, and millions to maintain.
Why is climate research a matter of national security, involving the oversight of defense contractors and personnel with security clearance? For at least two reasons. First, it is of strategic interest to the United States to know how the planet will be affected by global warming. If large parts of China or the Netherlands are going to end up submerged under 20 feet of water, and millions of people will have to be evacuated, this U.S. would not want to leave the ability to forecast this to, let us say, non-allied countries. Another reason is that with the increased likelihood of hurricanes in the Gulf (to mention one case of extreme weather) it is a matter of national security to have better models for predicting the likely trajectory of a hurricane as it approaches land. A wrong guess can cost billions.
Despite the global warming deniers among politicians who are loyal to the big energy lobby, which represents only one industry among many that positively dwarf the media economically, you can rest assured that funding for the development of sophisticated climate models and the elaborate high-performance computing systems, scientists and operational support personnel needed to design, run and maintain them them is provisioned by the federal government as a matter national security.
