WASHINGTON — The servers are dark. The climate models are dead. We are flying blind into the storm. In their place sits 68-year-old Earl Higgins, a retired drywall installer whose deteriorating left meniscus now serves as the federal government’s sole early warning system for atmospheric catastrophes.

The dismantling of the National Center for Atmospheric Research is complete. The Department of Energy has officially transferred all global forecasting duties to Higgins' living room recliner in Topeka.

"We finally neutralized the woke algorithms," said Trent Furlong, OMB Deputy Director of Ideological Meteorology. "Earl doesn’t care about greenhouse gases. Earl only knows that when his ACL throbs, a Category 5 is likely brewing in the Atlantic."

The new tactical protocol is strictly analog. Instead of processing petabytes of satellite telemetry to warn citizens of impending danger, the National Weather Service now calls Higgins at dawn to ask if he needs a heating pad.

"It's a heavy burden, replacing fifty years of Earth system science," Higgins said, rubbing a localized low-pressure system near his kneecap. "But honestly, my joints haven't been this inflamed since the Blizzard of '96, so I'd advise the Gulf Coast to start swimming."

At press time, the Pentagon had successfully replaced its geopolitical threat-assessment matrix with a squirrel that acts weird before an earthquake.