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submitted 6 months ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] thesystemisdown@lemmy.world 84 points 6 months ago* (last edited 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.

[-] disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 12 points 6 months ago

Project 2025 is a very thorough, and legitimately terrifying plan.

https://www.project2025.org/

[-] eran_morad@lemmy.world 50 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Anything to fuck America and help putin. Republicans are traitors.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 58 points 6 months ago

This isn't a Putin thing, this is an ideology and corporatism thing. They hate the NOAA because it dares to present the very apparent evidence that climate change is happening without doing much editorializing about it, but they also hate it because the National Weather Service is public and AccuWeather is private. They want AccuWeather to predict our nation's weather. Which is a huge problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AccuWeather#Criticisms

[-] eran_morad@lemmy.world 34 points 6 months ago

And they also hate it because it works to the great benefit of America.

[-] snooggums@midwest.social 17 points 6 months ago

Just like social security, the post office, medicaid/medicare, welfare, and every other public service the government provides that the Republicans are dismantling.

Yet they convinced the people who benefit from all of those things the most to vote for them.

[-] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 22 points 6 months ago

Coincidentally, climate denial and more power to the private sector is exactly what Putin wants.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 14 points 6 months ago

Maybe so, but their climate change denial pre-dates Putin's leadership by as long time and is entirely about corporatism.

[-] Scrawny@lemm.ee 12 points 6 months ago

Where do they think AccuWeather gets it's data from??

[-] Asafum@feddit.nl 6 points 6 months ago

Trump already had the CEO head the government agency that covers weather. This is 100% about the grift, privatize everything, to hell with the consequences as long as "I get mine."

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1CH0AA/

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[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago

and help putin

This is old school Grover Norquist

I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

bureaucratic abolitionism.

[-] eran_morad@lemmy.world 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Please. This isn’t about small gummint, those fucking asshole traitors could fuck off out of our private lives and doctors’ offices. They’re perfectly happy to expand gummint reach when it serves to oppress Americans.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

Norquist was an absolutist, and would have probably been very happy if every aspect of the state - from the Post Office to the Pentagon - was run by a corporate entity.

There are definitely different interpretations of his anti-government philosophy. But if you were going to name a Russian who has influenced the current state of affairs, I'd point to Ayn Rand long before I called out Vladimir.

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[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 36 points 6 months ago* (last edited 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'.

[-] ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 17 points 6 months ago

I, too, want a return to the old farmers almanac.

[-] DBT@lemmy.world 6 points 6 months ago

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

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[-] dhork@lemmy.world 35 points 6 months ago

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

[-] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 6 months ago

If only he was allowed to nuke it.

[-] dhork@lemmy.world 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 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.

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 3 points 6 months ago

Perhaps we can convince him to go yell at a hurricane and stand in its path.

[-] Zipitydew@sh.itjust.works 5 points 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.

[-] snekerpimp@lemmy.world 25 points 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.works 3 points 6 months ago

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

[-] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 23 points 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 22 points 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 6 points 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.

[-] Kyrgizion@lemmy.world 20 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

After thinking about it, I've come to the conclusion that climate change is actually completely in the far right's advantage:

-It'll make the poor poorer and the rich richer

-It can be used as a "demon" to scare people into submission, or the other way around, by denying it

-It can be used to divide the populace further along the lines of race, age, education.... (and not along class lines, as it should be)

-It will exacerbate current issues and divides between well-off nations and poor ones

It's win/win for them. The other political side actually has to be able to prove things somewhat in order to use climate change as something to garner votes. For the far right, it suffices to either pretend it doesn't exist or to laugh at it.

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[-] grue@lemmy.world 9 points 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.

[-] Fedizen@lemmy.world 7 points 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

[-] rayyy@lemmy.world 7 points 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.

[-] blazera@lemmy.world 6 points 6 months ago

I mean he appointed climate change deniers to the EPA last time

[-] ekZepp@lemmy.world 6 points 6 months ago

That alone wouldn't be so bad... If Reality would actually give a shit about politics agendas, i mean.

[-] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago

Actually, dismantling the agency that tells people when there's a hurricane coming without a profit motive that might affect forecasts IS pretty damn bad in and of itself!

[-] Blaster_M@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago

Team Red has it in their heads that all the temperature and climate measuring tools are all bunk data because they were installed in areas that have since urbanised, causing an artificial shift in temperatures.

So they haven't countered yet when I mention that satellite rangefinding equipment can accurately measure the average sea level and its rise... and that an erroneous reading due to something like periodic heat from a barbecue or whatever doesn't affect the average in any significant way.

[-] trebuchet@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago

Team Red doesn't actually have anything of the sort in their heads. They already decided on the conclusion, which is that climate change is fake, and then they grasp on whatever the flavor du jour is for the rationalization on why it's true. That might happen to be this thing you're saying about measuring tools in urbanized areas, but if you cut that down they'll just switch to some other rationalization.

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't arrive at with reason in the first place.

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[-] WraithGear@lemmy.world 5 points 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.

[-] Gingerlegs@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago

Because this is the problem!

[-] aniki@lemm.ee 3 points 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.

[-] TheDudeV2@lemmy.ca 2 points 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.

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this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
475 points (98.0% liked)

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