Plan to break up Noaa claims its research is ‘climate alarmism’ and calls for commercializing forecasts, weakening forecasts

Plan to break up Noaa claims its research is ‘climate alarmism’ and calls for commercializing forecasts, weakening forecasts

Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests.

Joe Biden’s presidency has increased theprofile of the science-based federal agency but its future has been put in doubt if Trump wins a second term and at a time when climate impacts continue to worsen.

The plan to “break up Noaa is laid out in the Project 2025 document written by more than 350 rightwingers and helmed by the Heritage Foundation. Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president.

The document bears the fingerprints of Trump allies, including Johnny McEntee, who was one of Trump’s closest aides and is a senior adviser to Project 2025. “The National Oceanographic [sic] and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the proposal says.

That’s a sign that the far right has “no interest in climate truth”, said Chris Gloninger, who last year left his job as a meteorologist in Iowa after receiving death threats over his spotlighting of global warming.

  • Fedizen@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    dismantling NOAA would likely kill a lot of people as they provide tools to predict flooding etc. It would probably be as disasterous as dismantling USGS

  • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    He’s just mad at the hurricanes for not doing what his sharpie told them to

      • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        Haven’t you heard? He has total immunity for everything, as long as either a majority of the House or 34 Senators are willing to let him do it.

        He can totally grab that hurricane by the pussy if he wants to.

    • Zipitydew@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      6 months ago

      Exactly. He’s that fucking petty that no other motivation is needed to explain this. There isn’t any long term scheme here. It’s simply that he got embarrassed and has to get revenge.

  • rayyy@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    The GOP today has no interest in climate truth, honesty, integrity, compassion or intelligence, only self-serving greed and power. Of course the “poorly educated” and Russian propagandized class go right along with it.

  • TheDudeV2@lemmy.ca
    0·
    6 months ago

    Michael Lewis wrote an interesting book on this, published as an audio-book in 2018, called The Coming Storm (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41016100-the-coming-storm). It’s well worth the listen:

    In his first Audible Original feature, New York Times best-selling author and journalist Michael Lewis delivers hard-hitting research on not-so-random weather data — and how Washington plans to release it. He also digs deep into the lives of two scientists who revolutionized climate predictions, bringing warning systems to previously unimaginable levels of accuracy. One is Kathy Sullivan, a gifted scientist among the first women in space; the other, D.J. Patil, is a trickster-turned-mathematician and a political adviser.

    Most urgently, Lewis’s narrative reveals the potential cost of putting a price tag on information with the potential to save lives, raising questions about balancing public service with profits in an ethically-ambiguous atmosphere.

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    calls for commercializing forecasts

    As usual, the hyperpartisan bullshit (climate change denial) is the cover, while corporate handouts/regulatory capture (in this case, to Accuweather) is the grift behind the grift.

  • thesystemisdown@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    The headline gives far too much attention to Trump and buries the lede. If there is another Republican president, they will be expected to toe the line. This is the initiative of Project 2025. This is the Republican playbook.

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    Dismantling NOAA is surrendering our military capability. We’re the world’s premiere air and sea power. That’s why we have an entire longstanding government agency for monitoring the ocean and atmosphere. It helps with farming and policy and emergency response sure, but don’t kid yourself, NOAA exists to ensure we never lose a major military asset to weather without taking a calculated risk.

  • Asafum@feddit.nl
    0·
    6 months ago

    It’s making me very upset to find that I seem to have an endless capacity for hate when it comes to these fucking parasites.

    I like to think of myself as a compassionate person, but then I find myself somehow even more angry at these sorry excuses for human beings.

    I can’t fucking believe they’re going to win and just how much we stand to lose…

    “Woke” “climate terrorists” “communism” “Christian persecution”

    These are the fucking things that are driving people to vote for Republicans and it’s working. …I just can’t even anymore…

    • Delusional@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 months ago

      It’s times like these that I like to remind myself that humans are just stupid animals on this planet and eventually everything perishes.

      Now back to spending most of my life working for shit wages at a company that doesn’t care about it’s employees.

  • Aniki 🌱🌿@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    The entire capitalistic maritime operation in this country is beholden to data provided by NOAA. It would be chaos if they were no longer around to provide data free of charge.

  • WraithGear@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    The fuck? The science established for weather tracking has gotten so good so fast, trusting the weatherman went from being a meme to being prophetic almost overnight. I get notifications about weather phenomena akin to the future segment in back to the future 2.

  • snekerpimp@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    Can’t wait for these old farts to suffer the consequences of their actions……. Oh wait, they won’t

    • prole@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      And even if they did, they’d find a way to blame it on someone else. Probably Democrats.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    Good. We need to predict the weather like Jesus intended us to: the feeling in grandpa’s bad knee that rain is a-comin’.

    • DBT@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 months ago

      It sounds silly, but this is actually a thing when you get old for some stupid reason.

        • DBT@lemmy.world
          0·
          6 months ago

          I was speaking from experience. My old tendinitis injury seems to return briefly whenever a cold rain is about to happen.

          Edit:

          lol. I’ll have to pay more attention in the future. I swear it’s true tho.

          Does research matter when you have personal experience?

          That’s a fair question. And it’s something I’ve even heard in TV commercials about headache medicines: “I don’t care about the research. I just know what works for me.” But it’s worth remembering that humans have a remarkable tendency to remember when two things occur or change together (such as wet, gloomy weather and joint pain), but remember less when things do not occur together. That rainy day when you felt no better or worse is unlikely to be so notable that you remember it. If you rely solely on memory rather than on more rigorous, data-based evidence, it’s easy to conclude a link exists where, in fact, none does.