The first topic is whether people will listen to weather warnings and change behavior in response to them in the first place. In that sense, it seems like a direct and urgent evacuation order should have happened, but I do still find the timeline rather short. Hindsight is 20/20 on that.
The second topic is the author’s opinion that the left-leaning section of media isn’t doing their due diligence.
Let’s be real here, the author of the article is using a cherry-picked event that happens to allegedly not be a result of climate change to try and discredit the general idea of climate change. I don’t think the author intended to discredit climate change as a concept but that’s how the audience will read it.
Sure, the New York Times got it wrong in this specific case and at least partially jumped to a conclusion, but it is established observed scientific fact that human caused climate change is causing and going to cause more extreme weather patterns moving forward.
It is also established fact that DOGE made cuts to the NWS and had to re-hire to stabilize the department as recently as last month. [1] Furthermore, the Trump administration intends to make deep cuts to the NOAA within its 2026 budget proposal. [2]
So while this specific event may not have been affected by budget cuts, we don’t know that for sure yet. Opposition Democrats are asking for investigations into that very question.
And even if NWS cuts didn’t affect this event, it’s still entirely fair for the political discussion to question the merit of making cuts during the same timeline as a preventable tragedy. At some point the administration must own the optics it generates for itself. If it didn’t want those optics it would commit to fully funding the NOAA and NWS, but because this administration has taken action to cut staff and funding, they do have to own the optics even if the optics aren’t always perfectly in line with the truth of the cause and effect. That’s just how politics work.
In other words, if I cut funding to the road department or even merely propose funding cuts and the next day my constituent hits a pothole, they’re going to blame me even if my actions didn’t directly create that pothole. And that blame is politically justified and warranted, because my political stance is that we are spending too much on road maintenance, when clearly that’s not the case.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/national-weather-service-hiring-spr...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2025/04/11/nx-s1-5361366/major-budget-cu...